Labs

The first lab of the TACTFUL Day-1 sessions deals with the topic “Challenges for Managing Urban Climate Change”.

The lab session highlights the major concerns in Asia Pacific with respect to climate change with focus on urban heat mitigation. Existing development scenarios having bearance on urban climate, factors that accentuate Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects, policy implications, further responses and strategies necessary for urban climate change resilience, emerent concepts like Green Recovery, Urban-Rural Nexus and the like shall be touched upon in this session.

The second lab of the TACTFUL Day-1 sessions deals with the topic “Research & Practices for managing impacts of Urban Heat & COVID-19 in Urban Areas”.

COVID19 and Climate change are well described as global threats today. The recent pandemic lockdowns played a significant role in changing the behavior patterns of the people and reducing the frequency of transport, industrial activities, air pollution in many cities across the world, though for a short time frame.

The lab session highlights the advances in understanding and responding to the positive and negative impacts of the pandemic, emerging crosscutting issues, and approaches that could possibly be interwoven into climate change resilience strategies. The session briefs on some key lessons for cities in Asia Pacific from COVID-19 together with emerging and innovative approaches towards addressing climate change, urban heat island, heat vulnerability assessment, adaptation & mitigation techniques in built areas and urban resilience strategies.

The Urban Lab- 3 on second day of the UTC-TACTFUL would highlight the urban climate change initiatives in Asian cities with an emphasis on the innovative and resilient solutions to tackle the challenges of convergent issues. With an aim to virtually showcase the proposed urban solutions in a clear structured Road Map, Action Plan, Roles and Responsibilities, Commitments and Priority Actions to act as tools for SDGs and New Urban Agenda (NUA) implementation, good practices will be discussed from different cities around the world to learn from their cases and identify the existing gaps and way forward for urban India.

The threats from climate change are now commonly agreed to be inevitable. At the same time, newer insights into the vulnerabilities of urban and rural societies are being experienced due to the current pandemic of COVID-19. In the recent times discussions on the city planning & economic performance of cities seem to be dominated by the concerns for managing & responding to the pandemic. A need, therefore, is eminent to address the issues out of ongoing pandemic and climate change together. The plenary would overview the discussions that took place during the previous Urban Labs and deliberate on the emergent challenges and avenues for innovation in urban heat mitigation & COVID-19 management in Asian cities. The key sectors that would be addressed include development policy, finance, technology, social innovation. As an outcome of the session, an outline of the action plan for addressing urban heat challenges in Asian cities and localization of SDGs & NUA would be formulated.