Approximately 1 billion people currently live in informal settlements, primarily in urban areas in low-and middle-income countries. Informal settlements are defined by poor-quality houses or shacks built outside formal laws and regulations. Most informal settlements lack piped water or adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, and public services. Many are on dangerous sites because their inhabitants have a higher chance of avoiding eviction. This paper considers how to build resilience to the impacts of climate change in informal settlements. It focuses on informal settlements in cities in low-and middle-income countries and how these concentrate at-risk populations. This paper also reviews what is being done to address climate resilience in informal settlements. In particular, community-and city-government-led measures to upgrade settlements can enhance resilience to climate-change risks and serve vulnerable groups. It also discusses how the barriers to greater scale and effectiveness can be overcome, including with synergies with the Sustainable Development Goals. Rapid Urbanization and Growth of Informal SettlementsThe current urban population is approximately 4.4 billion people globally. About 3.4 billion people currently live in urban centers in what the United Nations (UN) terms ''less developed regions.'' 1 UN projections suggest that urban population growth in ''less developed regions'' will be over 2 billion people by 2050 and that close to 90% of this increase will be in Asia and Africa. This means that another 2 billion urban dwellers will require housing, basic services, and resilience to climate-change impacts. 1 At present, approximately 1 billion urban dwellers live in what are termed informal settlements in poor-quality houses or shacks. 2 Informal settlements fall outside formal laws and regulations on land ownership, land use, and buildings. Their illegality makes government agencies unable or unwilling to work with them. These are settlements to which city governments have not extended what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) terms risk-reducing infrastructure (paved roads, storm and surface drainage, piped water, etc.) and services relevant to resilience (including healthcare, emergency services, and rules of law). 2 Many informal settlements are ill prepared for climate change and face particularly high risks of floods and landslides as a result of poor-quality buildings and a lack of infrastructure to prevent flooding, withstand heavy storms, and cope with heat waves. 2 In the absence of more effective policies, most of the world's growth in urban population will be accommodated in informal settlements. Given the projected rates and regions of urban population growth by 2050, there is an urgent need to build resilience to climate change in these settlements and to do so at scale. There is also an urgent need to vastly expand the supply and reduce the cost of ''formal'' (i.e., legal) housing that provides low-income groups with safer and more accessible alternatives to...

Adaptation to climate change in urban areas presents a complex challenge. Consequently, approaches to urban adaptation should be both multilevel and multidimensional. Community-based adaptation (CBA) presents an opportunity for locallevel participation in framing adaptation planning and activities, with wider transformative potential for urban governance. This paper presents five case studies from cities in the Global South which offer insights into the different scales at which CBA can be mainstreamed in urban contexts, and the various ways in which this is happening. These examples demonstrate five emerging opportunities for mainstreaming urban CBA, which include using CBA as part of a wider package of approaches; seizing processes of institutional reform as an opportunity to integrate community perspectives; institutionalizing new actors and approaches as a mechanism for scaling up multi-stakeholder approaches; ensuring topdown planning approaches are connected to local dynamics; and using participatory research to facilitate local communities in shaping planning processes. The cases also demonstrate that while obstacles to mainstreaming in urban contexts remain, some lessons in addressing these challenges have emerged, and CBA should, therefore, be a part of the toolbox of local and national urban adaptation policy frameworks.

This paper describes how the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) programme seeks to use finance to augment community-driven development processes in 19 nations and enable their scaling up to the city and national levels. The lack of accessible and flexible finance is a key stumbling block for the majority of community development processes in Asia. The paper begins by examining how this programme approaches the issue of finance in the wider context of community-driven upgrading, and elaborates the role that community networks can play in encouraging collective activities. It then explains how community finance leads to the establishment of community development funds (CDFs), financial platforms made up of contributions from different sources, including community savings, ACCA seed funds and contributions from local/ national government or other actors. These both encourage collaboration and increase the scale of what can be done. The paper gives examples of how CDFs can operate at different levels: locally, between groups of communities with shared problems and goals; on a citywide scale (107 citywide funds are now in operation); or at a national level, as in the Philippines, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

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a b s t r a c tA growing number of programmes and initiatives around the world are attempting to strengthen the capacities of civil society and local governments to build urban climate resilience. However, these often treat issues of power and justice in relatively unproblematic ways, without considering whether their activities will entrench existing relationships or whether they have the potential to achieve more transformative change. This paper examines the capacity strengthening initiatives undertaken in two cities within the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) -Bandar Lampung (Indonesia) and Hat Yai (Thailand) -to assess how ideas of power and justice have been incorporated. It examines the ways in which these activities are perceived to generate particular benefits, but also explores how the process and content were defined, and the ways in which different stakeholders participated in them. By doing so, it assesses both the procedural elements of capacity building (who is involved, how they are selected) and the distributional elements (how the outcomes of capacity building programmes affect different groups). These elements of justice can be both implicit and explicit, but need to be engaged with more critically if the processes and outcomes are to contribute to more transformative patterns of urban resilience.

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Disasters have tragic consequences, and people with the least resources at hand to rebuild their lives are often the worst affected. The traditional response to disasters is to provide immediate relief, without considering how the process of rebuilding lives and communities can be a positive opportunity for change. This opportunity can be facilitated in two ways: first, by having a clear understanding of how disaster survivors are not victims but agents for change; and second, by providing the tools and techniques to facilitate the change process. Case studies from Asia demonstrate how disaster-affected communities have rebuilt not only their homes but also their livelihoods, and have been empowered as a result.