原文标题：
Climate change
Heat island
Mumbai plans for net-zero 20 years before the rest of India
The megalopolis has released an ambitious “climate action plan”
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ON MARCH 13TH, as commuters stream ed out of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a gothic revival masterpiece in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, they were confronted with temperatures approaching 40°C, nearly 7°C above normal for the time of year. The city is in the midst of a debilitating heatwave, its 13th in the past five decades, nearly half of which occurred in the past 15 years. Mumbai’s average temperature has increased by over 1°C in that period (see chart).
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Had those commuters crossed the street from the station and entered the city’s (equally grand) municipal headquarters that day, they might have found cause for optimism. That afternoon bigwigs from the municipality and the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, had gathered to unveil a “climate action plan”. The city aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, two decades earlier than the target set by the national government.
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Mumbai is extremely vulnerable to climate change. A narrow and densely populated island, made up mostly of reclaimed land and surrounded on three sides by the Arabian Sea, it is battered by monsoon rains for four months a year and routinely subject to biblical flooding, especially during high tide. That is bad enough for the city’s apartment-dwellers. But it is even worse for the 42% of the population who live in slums, which are liable to be washed away or buried by landslides.
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The backbone of the plan is a proposal to decarbonise Mumbai’s energy. Generating the city’s electricity, which produces nearly two-thirds of the city’s emissions, relies mostly on burning fossil fuels, particularly coal. The city wants to increase the share of renewables. It is looking, for instance, into installing solar panels on rooftops. Another priority is to improve the quality and efficiency of the city’s buildings. Slums, especially, are heat islands. Made of whatever materials are at hand or cheaply available, including tarpaulin and tin, they are five or six degrees hotter than pukka structures, making them, as the report puts it, “uninhabitable” on hot days. Moreover, the heat, damp and cramped conditions make slum residents more vulnerable to disease—a less obvious risk of climate change.
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The plan is, alas, skimpy on details of how to achieve its ambitions. Still, in publishing one at all Mumbai has led the way among South Asian metropolises. Other cities are keen to follow suit, says Shruti Narayan of C40, a club of megacities, who helped with the report. Chennai and Bangalore in the south have started work on their plans. Others, including Delhi and Kolkata in India, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Karachi in Pakistan have expressed interest in doing something similar.
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There is plenty in Mumbai’s 240-page document to inspire them. One is the fact that it does not rely on using technologies that do not yet exist, a criticism levelled at many countries’ national proposals. Another is the attention given to adaptation (coping with all the bad things already happening) and not just mitigation (reducing future emissions).
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Specifics may anyway be beside the point. The real value of Mumbai’s plan is as a signalling device that “focuses the attention of policymakers”, reckons Abhas Jha, a climate specialist at the World Bank. The Paris Agreement, which committed the world to the goal of keeping the rise in temperatures to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, worked in much the same way, leaving countries to hash out details later. Time, though, is getting ever shorter.
（恭喜读完，本篇英语词汇量662左右）
原文出自：2022年3月19日《The Economist》Asia版块。
精读笔记来源于：自由英语之路
本文翻译整理：Fei Min本文编辑校对: Irene仅供个人英语学习交流使用。
【补充资料】（来源于网络）
热岛效应（Urban Heat Island Effect）是指一个地区的气温高于周围地区的现象。用两个代表性测点的气温差值（即热岛强度）表示。主要有城市热岛效应和青藏高原热岛效应两种。
热岛效应是由于人为原因，改变了城市地表的局部温度、湿度、空气对流等因素，进而引起的城市小气候变化现象。该现象，属于城市气候最明显的特征之一。
C40城市集团是一个致力于应对气候变化的国际城市联合组织。包括中国、美国、加拿大、英国、法国、德国、日本、韩国、澳大利亚等各国城市成员。于2005年由前任伦敦市长肯·利文斯顿的提提议下成立，围绕着《克林顿气候倡议》（CCI）来实行减排计划，以CCI来推动C40城市的减排行动和可持续发展。
《巴黎协定》（The Paris Agreement），是由全世界178个缔约方共同签署的气候变化协定，是对2020年后全球应对气候变化的行动作出的统一安排。《巴黎协定》的长期目标是将全球平均气温较前工业化时期上升幅度控制在2摄氏度以内，并努力将温度上升幅度限制在1.5摄氏度以内 。
《巴黎协定》于2015年12月12日在第21届联合国气候变化大会（巴黎气候大会）上通过，于2016年4月22日在美国纽约联合国大厦签署，于2016年11月4日起正式实施。
2021年11月13日，联合国气候变化大会(COP26)在英国格拉斯哥闭幕。经过两周的谈判，各缔约方最终完成了《巴黎协定》实施细则 。
【重点句子】（3个）
Mumbai is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
The backbone of the plan is a proposal to decarbonise Mumbai’s energy.
The plan is, alas, skimpy on details of how to achieve its ambitions.
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