The scale of the devastation to urban populations and economies caused by extreme weather events in recent years highlights their vulnerabilities. Worldwide, there has been a rapid growth in the number of people killed or seriously impacted by storms and floods and also in the amount of economic damage caused; a large and growing proportion of these impacts are in urban areas in low- and middle-income nations. Climate change is likely to have been a factor in much of this, but even if it was not, it is proof of the vulnerability of urban populations to floods and storms whose frequency and intensity climate change is likely to increase in most places. Climate change will also bring other less dramatic stresses such as heat waves and, for many urban areas, reductions in freshwater availability; also sea-level rise for all coastal cities. Without major changes in the ways that governments and international agencies work in urban areas, the scale of these impacts will increase.

This report focuses on the vulnerability of urban populations in low- and middle-income nations to the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. This is for three reasons.

A large and growing proportion of those most at risk from climate change live in urban areas. More than a third of the world’s total population lives in urban areas in low- and middle-income nations. These nations now have most of the world’s urban population and most of the largest cities. Their urban centres will house most of the growth in the world’s population over the next few decades and how this is planned for and managed has very large implications for the extent to which adaptation limits the costs of climate change. Since 1950, there has been a sevenfold increase in the urban populations of low- and middle-income nations and a much-increased concentration of people and economic activities in low-lying coastal zones or other areas at risk from flooding and extreme weather events. Even Africa, long considered a rural continent, has two-fifths of its population in urban areas – and a larger urban population than Northern America. The last 50 years has also brought a very large increase in the number of urban dwellers living in poverty, lacking provision for the basic infrastructure and services that should protect them from environmental health hazards and disasters – and which should form the basis for protection from most impacts related to climate change. Around one billion urban dwellers live in poor-quality, overcrowded housing in “slums” or informal settlements, and a high proportion of these settlements are on sites at risk from flooding or landslides.

Successful national economies depend on well-functioning and resilient urban centres. Urgent action is needed now both to address urban centres’ current vulnerabilities to extreme weather and to build into expanding urban centres protection from likely future changes. Most buildings and infrastructure have long lives; what is built now needs to be able to cope with the climate change-induced risks over the next few decades. Ninety-nine per cent of households and businesses in low-income nations do not have disaster insurance.

Too little attention has been given to the vulnerability of urban populations to climate change – and especially to the vulnerability of their low-income populations. The need for more attention to this does not imply that rural populations’ vulnerabilities should be given less attention; indeed, a high proportion of the people whose lives and livelihoods are most at risk from climate change are rural dwellers. But the growing literature on adaptation gives far more attention to agriculture and to rural livelihoods than to urban economies and livelihoods. It is also inappropriate to consider rural and urban areas separately, given the dependence of urban centres on rural ecological services, the importance for many urban economies of rural demand for goods and services, and the reliance of much of the rural populations on urban centres for access to markets, goods and services.

Adaptation to climate change requires local knowledge, local competence and local capacity within local governments. It needs households and community organizations with the knowledge and capacity to act. It also requires a willingness among local governments to work with lower-income groups.

For most prosperous and well-governed cities, adaptation to the likely risks from climate change for the next few decades does not appear problematic. This centres on adapting buildings and infrastructure to these increased risks; working with population groups and settlements most at risk to find solutions that serve them; and good disaster preparedness. But you cannot adapt infrastructure that is not there. Hundreds of millions of urban dwellers have no all-weather roads, no piped water supplies, no drains and no electricity supplies; they live in poor-quality homes on illegally occupied or sub-divided land, which inhibits any investment in more resilient buildings and often prevents infrastructure and service provision. A high proportion are tenants, with very limited capacities to pay for housing – and their landlords have no incentive to invest in better-quality buildings. Most low-income urban dwellers face serious constraints in any possibility of moving to less dangerous sites, because of their need to be close to income-earning opportunities and because of the lack of alternative, well-located, safer sites.

Worldwide, many of the urban centres that need to adapt most to avoid serious (and potentially catastrophic) impacts have large deficiencies in all of these preconditions for successful adaptation – and for addressing the development deficiencies that underpin their lack of adaptation capacity. Most of the risk to urban populations is associated with the incapacity of local governments to ensure provision for infrastructure and for disaster risk reduction and disaster preparedness – or their refusal to work with the inhabitants of “illegal settlements”, even when a third or more of the population (and workforce) live in these. This makes large sections of the urban population very vulnerable to any increases in the frequency or intensity of storms, floods or heat waves, and to increased risk of disease, constraints on water supplies or rises in food prices – which in wealthier, better-governed cities are usually easily adapted to. You cannot fund a pro-poor adaptation strategy if the city government refuses to work with the poor, or sees their homes, neighbourhoods and enterprises as “the problem”. It is difficult to conceive of how to achieve the needed adaptation in the many nations that have weak, ineffective and unaccountable local governments; some also suffer from civil conflicts and have no economic or political stability. Building the needed competence, capacity and accountability within local governments in high-income nations was a slow, difficult, highly contested process that did not have to deal with climate change and that was much helped by prosperity and economic stability.

The vulnerability of low-income urban dwellers to climate change is often ascribed to their poverty – but it is far more the result of failures or limitations in local government. These in turn are linked to the failure of national governments and international agencies to support urban policies and governance systems that ensure needed infrastructure is in place, along with preparedness for extreme weather and, where needed, sea-level rise. Most international agencies have chosen to avoid investing in urban initiatives.

Most national governments and international agencies have had little success in supporting successful local development in urban centres. They need to learn how to be far more effective in this and in supporting good local governance if they are to succeed in building adaptive capacity. Within international development assistance agencies, there may be a growing recognition of the importance of supporting “good governance” but this rarely focuses on the importance of good local governance. Even if it does, the institutional structures of most international agencies limit their capacity to support this. Meanwhile, the international agencies that are leading the discussions on how to support adaptation to climate change do not understand the political and institutional constraints on successful local adaptation. There is also a tendency to assume that as long as new funding sources for adaptation are identified, adaptation can take place.

Adaptation needs the attention of all sectors

There are clear and obvious linkages between adaptation to climate change and most other areas of development and environmental management. Housing and infrastructure policies and housing finance systems that support better-quality housing and provision for water and sanitation (which has to include provision for drainage) is one key part of adaptation; achieving this will also require more competent, accountable urban governments. Addressing health issues means not only better health care available to all (which should include emergency response capacity for extreme weather events) but also reducing environmental health risks. This should also reduce many of the increased health risks that climate change is likely to bring. Adaptation also has to focus on what is needed to reduce the vulnerabilities of particular groups to particular aspects of climate change – for instance, the particular vulnerabilities of infants and children and their carers and of older age groups. This too needs more competent and accountable urban governments. For any growing urban centre, a large part of urban planning should focus on providing lower-income groups with safer, legal alternatives to informal settlements by increasing the supply and reducing the cost of land for housing, and supporting infrastructure on suitable sites. This too is at the core of city adaptation to changing risk patterns related to climate change. So too is the kind of land use management that protects and enhances natural buffers and defences for cities and their surrounds. Getting the needed collaboration and “joined-up-thinking” between so many different departments within national and local governments will be difficult.

Clearly, careful attention is needed in each nation and city to the contributions that private enterprises and investments can make to adaptation. This obviously includes more attention to adapting their own premises. It also includes the many enterprises that can offer goods and services that help individuals, households and governments adapt. Extending appropriate financial services to lower-income groups can help them save and invest in safer homes and better livelihoods, all of which generally increases adaptive capacity. Insurance can also protect households and enterprises – and if appropriately structured, encourage risk reduction. But care is needed not to overstate the potential. Climate change will increase risks and most of those who face the most serious risks have very limited incomes. If local governments do not act to reduce risks, insurance premiums will be unaffordable – or no insurance will be on offer. Most of the financial safety nets that work for low-income groups are ones they set up and manage themselves. The potential of private sector investments and public–private partnerships to address urban development issues has long been overestimated; there is a danger that it will also be overstated for funding adaptation. An analysis of private investment flows into urban areas in low- and middle-income nations shows their potential to help fund some forms of infrastructure improvement and adaptation – but not the infrastructure most in need of improvement and adaptation, and not in most of the nations and cities where adaptation is most urgently needed.

There are innovative urban policies and practices underway, which show that adaptation is possible and can be built into development plans. These include examples of community-based initiatives led by organizations formed by the urban poor that greatly reduce their vulnerability to storms and floods – at very low unit cost. There are also good examples of local governments working in partnership with their low-income populations to improve housing conditions and infrastructure provision, or to develop new good-quality settlements. These include many partnerships between local governments and federations formed by slum and shack dwellers. There are also more post-disaster responses that recognize the competence and capacity of those displaced to rebuild their lives, including their homes and livelihoods – if the organizations that respond to the disaster allow them to do so.

But these are the exceptions. Few government bodies or international agencies recognize the competence and capacity within the populations they identify as “most at risk”. What is needed is consideration of how local development+adaptation innovations, comparable to those noted above, can be encouraged and supported in many more places. This is not replication, because each urban centre needs adaptation that responds to particular local conditions and capacities and that overcomes particular local constraints.

There are nations where the competence and accountability of city and municipal governments have increased considerably, providing the needed adaptive capacity – but most are in middle-income nations. And even here, it is difficult to get much attention to climate change adaptation from city governments and most national ministries and agencies within their urban policies and investments. Most have more pressing issues, including large backlogs in provision for infrastructure and services, and many urban dwellers living in poor-quality housing. They are also under pressure to improve education, health care and security – and seek ways to expand employment and attract new investment. Even competent and accountable national and local (city and municipal) governments will not engage with adaptation to climate change unless it is seen as supporting and enhancing the achievement of development goals. x

There is also the important shift underway in many agencies that focus on disasters away from disaster response to disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction. This has great relevance for adaptation to climate change but, as yet, this has not influenced many city and national policies.

Those discussing adaptation must remember the profound unfairness that exists globally between those who cause climate change and those who are most at risk from its effects. With regard to people, it is the high-consumption lifestyles of the wealthy (and the production systems that meet their consumption demands) that drive climate change, but it is mostly low-income groups in low- and middle-income nations, with negligible contributions to climate change, that are most at risk from its impacts. With regard to nations, the very survival of some small-island and some low-income nations (or their main cities) is in doubt, as much of their land area is at risk from sea-level rise, even though they have contributed very little to the global warming that drives it. With regard to cities, most larger companies and corporations can easily adjust to the new patterns of risk induced by climate change, and they move their offices and production facilities away from cities at risk. But cities cannot move. And all cities have within them the homes, cultural and financial assets and livelihoods of their inhabitants, much of which cannot be moved.

What will happen to international relations as increasing numbers of people lose their homes, assets, livelihoods and cultural heritages to climate change-related impacts – especially when the main causes of this are strongly associated with the lifestyles of high-income groups in high-income nations, and the reason for their loss is the failure of high-income nations to cut back their emissions?

The key issue is how to build, in tens of thousands of urban centres, resilience to the many impacts of climate change that:

• supports and works with the reduction of risks to other environmental hazards, including disasters (there are strong complementarities between reducing risk from climate change, non-climate change-related disasters and most other environmental hazards);

• is strongly pro-poor (most of those most at risk from climate change and from other environmental hazards have low incomes, which limits their autonomous adaptive capacity);

• builds on the knowledge acquired over the last 20 years on reducing risks from disasters in urban areas (there have been important advances here);

• is based on and builds a strong local knowledge base of climate variabilities and of the likely local impacts from climate change scenarios;

• encourages and supports actions that reduce risks (and vulnerabilities) now, while recognizing the importance of measures taken now to begin the needed long-term changes – urbanization processes have a momentum and drivers that are difficult to change, but at present these are mostly increasing risks from climate change and so can be considered mal-adaptation;

• recognizes that the core of the above is building the competence, capacity and accountability of city and sub-city levels of government and is changing their relationship with those living in informal settlements and working in the informal economy – and the importance within this of supporting civil society groups, especially representative organizations of the urban poor (this is also to avoid the danger of “adaptation” providing opportunities for powerful groups to evict low-income residents from land they want to develop);

• recognizes that government policies must encourage and support the contributions to adaptation of individuals, households, community organizations and enterprises;

• recognizes the key complementary roles required by higher levels of government and international agencies to support this (and that this requires major changes in policy for most international agencies that have long ignored urban issues and major changes in how adaptation is funded);

• builds resilience and adaptation capacity in rural areas – given the dependence of urban centres on rural production and ecological services and the importance for many urban economies and enterprises of rural demand for (producer and consumer) goods and services; and also

• builds into the above a mitigation framework (if successful cities in low- and middle-income nations develop without this, global greenhouse gas emissions cannot be reduced).

Two final points . First, it is inappropriate to conceive of “the problem” as mainly one of a lack of funding. Certainly, new funding sources are required to address backlogs in infrastructure and services and to build adaptive capacity. But, for most urban centres, the problem is as much a lack of local government competence and capacity. The need to adapt is being forced onto nations and cities that lack the political and economic basis for adaptation, even if new funding is provided. Within discussions on climate-change adaptation, there is too much focus on trying to calculate the funding needed for adaptation without recognizing the political and institutional constraints on adaptive capacity and without discussing the institutional mechanisms to get the needed funding for adaptation to those who can use it well – including community-based or grassroots-led initiatives.

Second, NAPAs (National Adaptation Programmes of Action) need to be built from city-focused CAPAs (City Adaptation Programmes of Action) and locally focused LAPAs (Local Adaptation Programmes for Action). Risks and vulnerabilities in all aspects of climate change are shaped by local contexts and much influenced by what local governments do or do not do. In the end, almost all adaptation is local and, to be effective, needs strong local knowledge and strong local adaptive capacity. Certainly for urban areas, there need to be CAPAs and, very often, smaller-scale LAPAs – especially for the settlements or areas most at risk. These, in turn, can also promote learning and innovation on how public policies and investments can work best with community-based adaptation. They also provide the practical experience on which NAPAs can be much improved.

International Organisation for Environment and Development
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Phone: +44 (0)20 7388 2117
Fax: +44 (0)20 7388 2826
nfo@iied.org
http://www.iied.org/

02/03/2009

02/03/2009

research

Urban Policy > Urban environment

Environmental sustainability