India: Chennai's ambitious plan to boost its green cover

DW (English)

Chennai in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu hopes to combat heat, flooding and pollution by regaining its urban forests lost during the city's rapid urban development.

Transcript

00:00Day by day, the heat is increasing.

00:04Now it's 40, 42.

00:06It's reaching that stage.

00:08It may look green, but you can only feel the heat inside.

00:11When it was green before, you wouldn't feel the sunlight.

00:15Now that there's nothing, the temperature has increased.

00:18I don't want to be like this in 2050.

00:31The state of Tamil Nadu is one of India's most urbanized regions.

00:35Cities like Chennai and Coimbatore, as well as surrounding villages,

00:40have been rapidly expanding to accommodate rising populations.

00:45But this has been accompanied with loss of vegetation.

00:49This in turn pushes up the land surface temperature,

00:52making the cities hotter.

00:5424-year-old Ananthi is from Valayapalayam village,

00:5920 kilometers from Coimbatore, where she went to school.

01:03She now works as a graphic designer in Bengaluru.

01:07When I was a kid, I used to see a lot of greenery.

01:10My dad also used to see a lot of greenery.

01:12But now I feel like it's all dry.

01:16One place in the state has bucked the trend,

01:19integrating greenery into its layout.

01:21In the 1960s, people from all over the world came together in Auroville

01:26to establish a sustainable township.

01:29Reforestation was one of the residents' goals,

01:32turning the desert site into a forest with over 3 million trees.

01:37Renu was part of building this community from the beginning.

01:40I think Auroville is very important,

01:43and what it can bring as a solution is very important.

01:47So everything took a lot of time to do just to get the first few things to grow.

01:51And many things were dying, dying, dying.

01:54And then suddenly, things started to grow.

01:58And then we started studying what kind of species grows here.

02:19Murali Murugan advocates for integrating trees into building designs

02:23without cutting them down.

02:25He's been developing this approach for over a decade.

02:46Man and nature have to collaborate.

02:49We have to work together.

02:51It's not one against the other or one dominating.

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