# 1. Introduction

Urbanization is inevitable and essential for future economic growth. What happens in cities and towns, particularly in the developing world, will determine the global economic growth, poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability and quality of life. Today, urban areas regularly experience increasing population, inadequate infrastructure, poverty, growth of informal settlements and environmental degradation, which do not pose a good picture for future sustainable development. In addition to these challenges, many cities across the globe are hotspots of vulnerability due to climate change and variability and are at risk from extreme and recurrent weather events. Recent decades have seen extreme weather events, such as the floods in Mumbai in July 2005, which have led to massive damages and loss of life and property, and adversely affected economic and social life. Such events have adverse consequences for economic development and poverty alleviation and can potentially alter the development trajectory of the city and surrounding areas. Accompanied by physical, economic and social vulnerabilities in such cities is the low adaptive capacity with constraints on physical, financial and human resources. It is, therefore, critical to assess the vulnerability of cities to extreme and recurrent weather events and their ability to respond in order to determine the future adaptation interventions.

The empirical study carried out in Mumbai aims to examine the exposure, vulnerability and ability to respond of households to recurrent floods and brings out policy implications for adaptive capacity. The study focuses particularly on the poor households in the city, who tend to have greater exposure and more vulnerability to hazards like floods and have limited ability to respond and adapt. Greater Mumbai, with a population of 12 million as per Census 2011 figures (GoI, 2011), is a megacity and an important financial center. However, the city is vulnerable to climate risks due to its flood‐prone location and the landmass composed largely of reclaimed land. The most vulnerable sections of the city are the residents in informal settlements known as slums, who comprise about 41% of the city’s households (GoI, 2011). Therefore, Mumbai is an important case study to understand the vulnerability of poor households to recurrent weather events and examine their ability to respond. The findings of this study have wider and significant policy implications.

The case study is structured as follows. The next section describes the city profile, rainfall pattern and the nature of recurrent floods. Methodology and data sources are outlined in Section 3 followed by the discussion on the findings on exposure, vulnerability and ability to respond in Section 4. Section 5 brings out the policy implications of the study followed by the summary and conclusions in Section 6.

# 2. Mumbai city: Profile, rainfall pattern and recurrent floods

Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) is currently the sixth largest urban agglomeration in the world with the population of 20 million (United Nations, 2014). The city is the financial capital of India with a large commercial and trading base. It plays host to a number of industries, multinational companies 3