Building Climate-Resilient Cities Across India

The Challenge

India's rapidly growing cities are increasingly exposed to flooding, extreme heat and water scarcity as climate change combines with rapid urbanisation and the loss of natural green spaces. Traditional grey infrastructure, such as concrete drainage systems, is often unable to cope with these growing risks and fails to deliver broader environmental or social benefits.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS), particularly the Sponge City approach, offer an effective alternative. By integrating parks, wetlands, rain gardens and other blue-green infrastructure into urban planning, cities can naturally absorb, store and filter stormwater while reducing heat, improving biodiversity and creating healthier public spaces.

Although many Indian cities have embraced Sponge City concepts in policy, implementation remains a major challenge. Limited technical expertise, fragmented governance, outdated procurement processes and insufficient maintenance capacity mean that many projects fall short of their intended impact, often resulting in conventional concrete structures rather than functioning nature-based solutions.

The Approach

For this project, we are partnering with Switzerland’s leading water research institute Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology); our local implementation partner, Sponge Collaborative, an emerging company that is successfully pioneering the Sponge City approach across India; and 360 Carbon, an innovative Swiss climate technology company specialized in satellite data, impact measurement, and evaluation.

Starting with the coastal megacities of Chennai and Mumbai, the consortium will work closely with municipal authorities to strengthen institutional capacity and improve how Sponge Parks are planned, designed, procured and maintained.

The partnership combines scientific research, technical training and practical implementation support. It will identify the institutional barriers preventing effective nature-based solutions, develop evidence-based planning and procurement guidelines, build the technical capacity of municipal engineers and support the design and tendering of pilot Sponge Parks, resulting in built evidence and demonstration sites.

Digital monitoring tools will track environmental performance, including flood resilience, vegetation health, urban heat reduction and maintenance needs, helping cities manage these assets over the long term and build the evidence base for scaling the approach nationwide.

Goals and Expected Impact

By 2028, the project aims to establish a scalable framework for integrating Sponge City principles into urban planning across India. Rather than funding park construction directly, the project focuses on building the institutional, technical, and financial systems needed for cities to implement nature-based infrastructure independently. This ensures that existing budgets allocated for urban climate adaptation result in projects that are implemented, monitored, and sustained well.

The project is expected to:

• Support the planning and tendering of pilot Sponge Parks (10 pilots in phase 1)
• Improve resilience for urban residents (up to 37,000 people in phase 1)
• Avoid tCO₂e emissions and remove tCO₂e through vegetation and soil carbon sequestration
• Strengthen the capacity of municipalities while creating practical guidelines, planning, and management frameworks that can be replicated across India and other countries facing similar urban climate challenges.