you know cities are probably the best
place to see action around climate our
systems
are what's driving a lot of climate
change
so
and if you can actually plan a city in a
better way be it with renewable energy
or even a forest station in an urban
area that would be a huge impact on
climate change
the impact is most felt at the city
level
and you are the first point of response
in any activities
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i think climate change presents a number
of challenges
certainly the impact of the extreme
weather the deep drought
the fires that come along with that
we've seen our air quality retreat after
decades of progress to some of the worst
air
quality even in the midst of a pandemic
that we've seen
in decades we've started to have many
more erratic weather events
than before and i think that is just a
pattern for what we now know as climate
change so
monsoons have reduced from 120 days on
an average to
about 72 days to 75 days but the volume
of monsoon has actually hit
double that of the 120 days volume so i
think that is really scary
one of the key challenges that we have
faced over the years is
flooding the rainfall pattern has
changed
coupled with inadequate infrastructure
to
accommodate running water and sometimes
sadly lives are lost
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we're looking at those things that have
immediate payoff as well those are the
things that we have to do that are long
term
we mapped where there's shade in los
angeles and where there's not
and we looked at putting new trees where
there weren't old trees
we looked at how we were paving our
streets and are pioneering some of the
first light paving of an asphalt that
literally brings the temperature down
by as much as 10 degrees because people
need to
feel cooler when we hit a drought most
of our
natural soil area is getting covered
with artificial elements like concrete
or asphalt
so there is no water that's percolating
into the ground so we've created
percolation ponds where it'll go down as
into the aquifer and we can really have
water tables rising hopefully after some
years
that's what what we're working on we are
building
heavy infrastructure or storm drains and
dredging
water bodies so that we can reduce the
incidence of
flooding and we've also started the
greening of open spaces in our car
so that we can get more fresh air
on the ground per example
plutover electric or very derozan
the burning of waste is a main source of
emission
in our car about 60 percent of it so we
are promoting more
recycling and reusing of waste and
our aim is that by 2030 we should
have the amount of waste that goes to
the landfill site
we are also encouraging a lot of
companies to
adopt renewable energy especially solar
we have a target of at least 25 of
energy to be clean and renewable by 2025
and we're trying to meet that one of the
things that i have been able to
luckily push is solarizing our highways
so we're having this one huge highway
connecting the two capitals of our state
mumbai and nagpur on that highway we
will be able to generate about 230
megawatts of clean solar energy along
with that we floated tenders for
floating solar panels of 80 megawatts
in one of our lakes and we're going to
do for all five or six of our lakes
we're also having a huge push for urban
forests that we initiated about
two years ago
uh
more parks more walkability more bikes
better public transit
a place that moved from being the car
capital of the world to a place that's
now the
transit capital of the world we're
taking off our gas plants that right now
generate much of our energy and actually
building
renewable energy projects some of the
largest for instance solar
projects in the united states of america
but i think that the thing i'm maybe
most proud of is
that we're taking all of our waste water
and going to be recycling that
and reduce the emissions that we uh have
because we bring a lot of
use a lot of electricity to bring that
water to los angeles today so
it's big and it's small it's
neighborhood based and it's
systemic as well but we're very excited
to be able to do that and to show
the world you can still have a great
city and a great quality of life even as
you transform
your environmental work