Building Resilience to Climate Change in Informal Settlements

Abstract

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...

Informal settlements in a COVID-19 world: moving beyond upgrading and envisioning revitalisation

“…Alleviating the chronic and acute human health and wellbeing problems in informal settlements is a key motivation for upgrading interventions. Learning lessons from previously-failed attempts to eradicate, evict, replace and relocate slum dwellers to formal housing, the contemporary global paradigm centres on in-situ upgrading to improve environmental quality, health, wellbeing and livelihoods (Satterthwaite et al 2020). Upgrading programs include a standard set of components: providing safe water and sanitation, paving streets, improving stormwater drainage, formalising electricity and solid waste collection, and land tenure regularisation, all delivered through a communitybased approach (UN-Habitat 2015).…”

“…Second, upgrading is too often seen as a technical product, not a process of community empowerment and partnership-building. 'Participation' is often token with residents required to fit into 'top down' project parameters (Satterthwaite et al 2020). Third, upgrading projects do not adequately respond to the complexity of the humanenvironment interface.…”

“…Our vision requires centring informal settlement residents and communities as key actors in the process of revitalization. We must build on the laudable progress made by informal settlement community groups and federations who, over many decades, have organised, built their capacity, and undertaken pioneering data collection and knowledge generation even in the face of significant obstacles and repression (Satterthwaite et al 2020). We must further fundamentally restructure the partnership ecosystem between community and government, as well as with other sectors such as academia and philanthropy, with a goal of more equal and trusted engagement.…”

“…‘Participation’ is often token with residents required to fit into ‘top down’ project parameters (Satterthwaite et al . 2020 ). Third, upgrading projects do not adequately respond to the complexity of the human-environment interface.…”

Exploring the Combined Effect of Urbanization and Climate Variability on Urban Vegetation: A Multi-Perspective Study Based on More than 3000 Cities in China

“…In recent decades, the world has experienced unprecedented urban growth and land consumption; the pressures on vital ecosystem functions have escalated rapidly [12,13]. By 2030, approximately five billion people will live in cities [14]. In this context of global urbanization combined with climate variability, understanding the response of urban vegetation to various factors and using it as a basis to protect urban ecosystems will help to achieve the goal of sustainable cities in the United Nations' sustainability framework [15][16][17].…”