Environmental Assessment of Kakinada City, Andhra Pradesh, India

Urbanization is a concerning component of development regarding sustainability, and it is creating issues impacting the environment, economy, and social factors. The environment is deteriorated due to the rapidly growing population, resource consumption, and migration of population from rural to urban areas. The increasing pace of urbanization is aggravating urban environment degradation. Thus, a detailed assessment is required to know the environmental problems in the urban areas. This study aims to evaluate the current environmental status and recommends environmental sustainable measures for the Kakinada Municipal Corporation (KMC), Andhra Pradesh, India. The study is conducted in four stages; the first stage identifies the aspects of environmental sustainability. The second stage assesses the indicators and collects the data from satellite imagery, census, urban local bodies (ULB), and sensors. It studies indicators and determines their benchmarking as per the standards and literature. The studied indicator domains are (i) temperature, (ii) green cover, (iii) population, (iv) waste, (v) radiation, (vi) humidity, (vii) air pollution, (viii) noise pollution, and (ix) light pollution. The map analysis is performed at ArcGIS and presented at five-pointer scale as per the benchmarking in the third stage. The environmental index is calculated by using indicator rankings and weights. The fourth stage consists of proposals and recommendations. It includes creating eco-zones, green buffers, green cover, nature, and Internet of Things (IoT) based interventions. As this study is conducted for a coastal city, it can be a pilot study for other coastal cities to adopt the same methodology for environmental assessment.