Chennai in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu hopes to combat heat, flooding and pollution by regaining its urban forests lost during the city's rapid urban development.
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00:00Day by day, the heat is increasing.
00:04Now it's 40, 42.
00:06It's reaching that stage.
00:08It may look green, but you can only feel the heat inside.
00:11When it was green before, you wouldn't feel the sunlight.
00:15Now that there's nothing, the temperature has increased.
00:18I don't want to be like this in 2050.
00:31The state of Tamil Nadu is one of India's most urbanized regions.
00:35Cities like Chennai and Coimbatore, as well as surrounding villages,
00:40have been rapidly expanding to accommodate rising populations.
00:45But this has been accompanied with loss of vegetation.
00:49This in turn pushes up the land surface temperature,
00:52making the cities hotter.
00:5424-year-old Ananthi is from Valayapalayam village,
00:5920 kilometers from Coimbatore, where she went to school.
01:03She now works as a graphic designer in Bengaluru.
01:07When I was a kid, I used to see a lot of greenery.
01:10My dad also used to see a lot of greenery.
01:12But now I feel like it's all dry.
01:16One place in the state has bucked the trend,
01:19integrating greenery into its layout.
01:21In the 1960s, people from all over the world came together in Auroville
01:26to establish a sustainable township.
01:29Reforestation was one of the residents' goals,
01:32turning the desert site into a forest with over 3 million trees.
01:37Renu was part of building this community from the beginning.
01:40I think Auroville is very important,
01:43and what it can bring as a solution is very important.
01:47So everything took a lot of time to do just to get the first few things to grow.
01:51And many things were dying, dying, dying.
01:54And then suddenly, things started to grow.
01:58And then we started studying what kind of species grows here.
02:19Murali Murugan advocates for integrating trees into building designs
02:23without cutting them down.
02:25He's been developing this approach for over a decade.
02:46Man and nature have to collaborate.
02:49We have to work together.
02:51It's not one against the other or one dominating.