Green Cities, Green Minds: Challenges of Urban Sustainability in Developing Countries — ASN Events

Green Cities, Green Minds: Challenges of Urban Sustainability in Developing Countries (17195)

Prodyut Bhattacharya 1
  1. GGS Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India

The concept of green city is emerging very fast, which also characterize with similar parameters of a sustainable city. In most of the developing countries urbanization has became a symbol of development, and the problem of unsustainable urban growth trend is now phenomenal, and such changes are inevitable in future, in the run of GDP growth and market economy for any country. Recent research indicates that human being facing profound changes in environmental condition such as flooding, drought, rising sea level due to multi-causal and complex phenomenon of climate change. Such environmental, social and biological drivers are putting a cascading effect on human life in urban areas, put direct effect on livelihoods, health and social inequalities. Climate vulnerability events raise emerging questions that why modern urbanization should adversely affect nature and original biodiversity of any area.
Historically most cities in Asia have grown in the bank of rivers and those rivers were the lifeline of the economy and for cultural cause, but due to mis-management, the riparian vegetation, fresh water, associated migrated and residents’ bird’s species losing their habitat, and it is becoming a dead ecosystem. Present paper suggest that governments in developing economy must promote attractive policy guidelines through tax restructure or amendments, such a manner that cities inspire the promoters of urban infrastructure for enhancing green space and water space (lake and other water bodies)in landscape, which will allow better ecosystem services in urban area.
This paper examines the examples of empirical studies on how the access to large natural space provides an antidote to the stress of urban life in selected cities. Tall trees, beautiful natural landscapes invite biodiversity, which provide paramount ecosystem services and act as carbon sinks, further link with the concept of “eco-psychology”, that human being, supports distressing through urban green space. Every new cities of Developing countries must evolve with appropriate plan to implement the concept of ‘biodiversity park’ for creating ecological corridor, which will restore vital balance in their damage ecosystem and will also support the plan of climate change mitigation by involving urban citizen in participatory manner. We need to demonstrate and explore that development and conservation can go hand in hand and it doesn’t require multimillion dollar projects; best time to start such activity is from today, if we have green cities, their lies green minds.