Bengaluru means different things to different people. For me, it’s February mornings in the early 2000s—fog clinging to the window panes, roses blooming in my grandmother’s backyard, old scooters humming past sleepy lanes. The city felt soft, slow, and sure of itself.
Today, I still wake up in Bengaluru—but it no longer feels the same. The mornings are warmer. The fog is gone. The roses bloom differently. This February, the temperature hovered above 21°C—far warmer than the 16°C mornings I remember as a child. It’s not just nostalgia—we do data that confirms it. According to a study by the Indian Institute of Science (Ramachandra et al., 2016), Bengaluru lost 88% of its green cover and 79% of its water bodies between 1973 and 2016 (source). The change is visible, measurable, and lived.
What we’re witnessing is climate change, but not the textbook version of melting glaciers and rising seas. It’s urban, local, personal and is right here. Climate change, at its core, is a long-term shift in temperatures and weather patterns, driven largely by human activity—greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and unsustainable consumption. But in Bengaluru, it shows up as floods in August and tankers in April. It’s longer commutes, hotter days, and shrinking shade.
The summer of 2022 hit hard. Tankers ran nonstop. People queued with buckets. Just months later, the city was submerged—flood water reaching inside autos and apartment basements. One auto driver told me, “Chennai is understandable, but now even Bengaluru looks like it.” He didn’t say “climate change,” but he knew what it felt like.
This isn’t just a story of shifting weather. It’s the price of decades of unplanned growth. Lakes filled in. Drains blocked. Trees cleared. What we experience as a climate crisis is also a governance and planning crisis. Climate change widened the cracks—but it didn’t create them.
In response, we often rush to fix symptoms. Plant trees. Save water. Share hashtags. But are we solving the problem, or just making peace with it? For instance, thousands of saplings were planted across the city in 2022, yet survival audits show that many didn’t make it through the summer. A planted tree is not a grown one. A pledge isn’t a plan.
Who is responsible? Everyone—and no one. That’s the problem. The accountability floats. And in the absence of systems that connect citizens, planners, and nature, we all scramble with patches.
As a U-CAN Fellow working on climate studies, I’m not here to offer answers. I’m trying to understand the problem better and more deeply. What, in reality, are we facing in Bengaluru? Climate change, yes—but not just defined by emissions, but by everyday realities. By how we built, what we ignored, and who now bears the brunt.
This blog is the beginning of that journey. Not to chase quick solutions, but to pause, ponder and define the questions we’ve long overlooked.
