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World Environment Day 2025

By Lodha

At the Lodha Foundation, our environmental efforts are rooted in a single ambition: to create and showcase an environmentally positive model of urbanization—one that places sustainability and ecological regeneration at the heart of how cities are built and lived in. We recognize the outsized role of the built environment in driving emissions, depleting resources, and shaping both the health of our planet and the economic future of our country.

For over a decade, we have been building Palava—a living lab of sustainable urbanization. The learnings from this ambitious project are now being carried into all our new developments, reinforcing a model that is not only aspirational but also replicable at scale. These insights are now also being leveraged by our Net Zero Urban Accelerator, a research initiative in partnership with RMI India, to influence broader urban development practices across the country.

Our work begins with nature. We focus on enhancing biodiversity and integrating green and blue infrastructure throughout the urban fabric. This is not just about aesthetics—adequate tree cover, water bodies, and dust control are key to improving microclimate and air quality, both of which deeply affect the livability of our cities.

As India progresses toward becoming a high-income economy by 2047, our cities will be at the heart of that journey. Urbanization is inextricably linked to productivity growth, and in this transition, we will need to ensure energy security, materials security, and climate security. These are not peripheral issues—they are foundational to achieving sustained social, technological, and industrial progress.

Over half of the world’s material and energy use happens in cities. We are doing our bit to demonstrate how cities can be built and run more efficiently. This means using fewer resources without compromising safety and longevity, deploying low-carbon materials like green concrete, exploring newly developed alternatives, and ensuring key materials such as steel are sourced responsibly.

Our commitment to energy efficiency is most visible in the homes at Palava, where passive design and high-efficiency systems have led to some of the lowest residential energy bills in similar category developments in India. Programs like UrjaAnk and our push for super-efficient air conditioners and fans show how thermal comfort can be made affordable without locking us into high emissions.

Once efficiency gains are maximized, we facilitate the clean energy transition by integrating renewable energy through every possible procurement pathway. And our work does not stop at buildings. We reduce transport emissions by designing walkable, transit-oriented communities where shared mobility and electric vehicles replace polluting alternatives. Walkability is not an afterthought—it is the starting point.

Our decarbonization strategy is as much about reducing emissions as it is about building resilience. We use synthetic climate datasets aligned with IPCC scenarios to design future-proof infrastructure, ensuring that today's decisions are not liabilities tomorrow. By integrating water conservation and waste management into city planning from the outset, we are creating developments that are more self-sufficient and less dependent on overstretched municipal systems.

At the Lodha Foundation, research meets implementation. The insights we generate are not locked away—they feed into Lodha's developments and are freely shared to enable others to follow. We believe a better city should not be a rare privilege but a common expectation.

On this World Environment Day, we reaffirm our commitment to leaving the planet better than we found it—and to building cities where future generations can thrive in harmony with nature.