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Informing City Climate Action Planning through Robust Data-driven Risk Assessments
Risaal Amina Esa, Soham Shah, Gaurav Sahni and Pushp Bajaj
October 2025 | Climate Resilience
Suggested Citation - R. Esa, S. Shah, G.Sahni and P. Bajaj. 2025. “Informing City Climate Action Planning through Robust Data-driven Risk Assessments.” SHELTER, HUDCO-HSMI Publication, Vol.26(2): 81-92
Overview
Indian cities are increasingly exposed to climate-induced hazards such as floods, heatwaves and water scarcity, with their impacts intensified by poor urban planning and rapid, unregulated urban expansion. City Climate Action Plans (CCAPs) function as strategic roadmaps for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate impacts, but their long-term effectiveness depends fundamentally on the quality and comprehensiveness of the Climate Risk Assessments (CRAs) that inform them. As CRAs form the first and most critical step in identifying context-specific risks and shaping effective adaptation strategies, it becomes essential to understand how current methodologies perform. This article fills a key gap by systematically reviewing the CRA approaches within CCAPs across Indian cities, assessing their strengths and weaknesses against defined criteria. It further examines institutional and technical barriers that constrain robust assessments and outlines the essential elements of an ideal CRA. It emphasises the need for granular, integrated and comprehensive methods that account for system interdependencies, governance constraints and socio-economic dimensions of vulnerability. Strengthening these approaches will be critical for enabling Indian cities to enhance adaptive capacities, make risk-informed planning decisions and advance towards a more climate-resilient urban future.
Key Highlights
- Shift to Hyperlocal Climate Action: National and state frameworks like the NAPCC and SAPCCs increasingly fall short in capturing the hyperlocal, city-specific climate risks. CCAPs are better suited to capture community needs and localised climate risk evidence.
- Critical Role of Climate Risk Assessments (CRAs): With expanding urban populations and stressed infrastructure, CRAs are essential for evidence-based urban resilience planning, helping cities systematically map hazards, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities.
- Four Distinct CRA Models in Indian CCAPs: A comparative review of seven CCAPs reveals four methodological models (A–D). The analysis was based on multiple parameters such as the hazards considered, spatial scale, extent of IPCC AR 5 conceptual integration, elements of risk and vulnerability assessment and inclusion of differential vulnerability in the document.
- Gaps in Current Assessments: Most CCAPs rely heavily on spatial overlays, qualitative judgments and limited socio-economic indicators, with insufficient integration of IPCC’s comprehensive risk definition and have weak engagement with vulnerable groups.
- Interconnected Urban Systems: Existing approaches often assess water, power, transport and health systems in isolation, overlooking cascading risks that can amplify climate impacts across essential services.
- Equity and Vulnerability Blind Spots: While some CCAPs include slums, informal workers or social groups, vulnerability assessments mostly remain uneven and lack quantitative depth.
- Data and Capacity Constraints: Limitations in high-resolution climate data, outdated census information and weak municipal capacity hinder granular and actionable CRA outputs indicating the need for stronger institutional and data systems.
Key Recommendations
- Adopt a standardised CRA framework- Use a consistent model such as the IPCC framework, with differential weights for exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity to improve analytical rigour and comparability across CCAPs.
- Create unified, cross-departmental data platforms- State and city governments should mandate shared, regularly updated datasets across water, energy, transport, health and planning departments in standardised formats.
- Integrate socio-economic and differential vulnerabilities- Ensure CRAs capture socio-economic disparities so that the most at-risk communities are appropriately represented in planning.
- Strengthen municipal capacity- Develop dedicated capacity-building programmes to equip municipal officials with the technical skills needed to mainstream climate resilience in urban governance.
- Use forward-looking hazard projections- Move beyond historical and recent data by incorporating future climate model projections for heat, rainfall variability, flooding and other hazards and adopt multi-hazard and human-centric indicators like heat stress.
- Map exposure through system interdependencies- Assess urban systems not in isolation but as interconnected networks to account for cascading impacts when one system fails.
"Without a comprehensive climate risk assessment, cities risk investing in infrastructure that may fail to perform effectively under climate stress."
