Informal Cities and Climate Resilience: building an inclusive approach

Informal settlements in cities of the developing world fare very poor under the ‘risk reducing’ infrastructure parameters of the IPCC. 

Climate change has brought in a unique and complex challenge for cities across the world.  While they have to accommodate the billions of immigrants from rural areas because of failures of crops and other livelihood avenues there, their fight against climate change face immense challenges because most of these immigrants have to live in informal settlements and depend on informal economies and hence remain highly vulnerable to such impacts.

The One Billion informal settlers at risk –

It is estimated that about one billion of urban dwellers across the world live in informal settlements often deprived of ‘risk reducing’ infrastructure and services, especially in the low and middle income countries.  This is according to a paper prepared by the International Institute for Environment and Development for the IPCC Cities and Climate Change Science Conference, held in first week of March at Edmonton. The IPCC, in its Fifth Assessment has defined such ‘risk reducing’ infrastructure. Most of these informal settlers come from outside and settle in vicinity of the urban areas, in shanty locations or slums, and provide various services to the better off urban population.  However, their economy is informal and their poverty deprives them of proper housing and other basic amenities.

They remain out of the conventional urban infrastructure which are supposed to be more climate resilient than informal infrastructures. The paper argues, and rightly so, these settlements are more vulnerable to risks associated with climate change impacts.  “Many of them are on land sites at high risk from flooding and landslides; these sites are chosen by their residents because they are less likely to be evicted as the land is unattractive to developers”, says this paper.  Further, they have poor quality of housing and live with high levels of risk from infectious and parasitic diseases, accidental fires and natural hazards and pollution.

Cities and climate change impacts

Cities in both the developed and developing economies are starting to realise the multiple devastating impacts they are facing due to climate change.

A study by CDP, a London based NGO, had found out in 2014 that more than two third of the cities reported climate change as a major threat to the cities and their businesses.

That’s important to note as the cities generate more than 80 per cent of the global GDP and consume more than two thirds of the world’s energy.  What is important to note is that cities only occupy 2 per cent of global land and produce a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions and consume more resources than needed.  With the kind of environmental impacts the cities themselves create, we are not sure they would be sustainable anywhere in near future.

A UN report of 2014 said that 54 per cent of the world’s population lived in urban areas at that time. This is supposed to increase to 66 per cent by the year 2050.  Projections show that urbanisation combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050, with close to 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa, according to this UN report.

In the CDP survey, most serious problems that the cities anticipated included damage to property and capital, impacts on the residents and employees, availability of raw materials, and the capacity of city infrastructure to deal with the changes. The cities predicted that by 2030 they would be risking assets worth 4 trillion US dollars due to climate change.  The concern for us therefore is to see how the informal settlements, which will grow the fastest among all projected populations, will have more vulnerabilities due to climate change unless cities plan out major measures towards both adaptation and mitigation.

Big infrastructural challenge

Informal settlements in cities of the developing world fare very poor under the ‘risk reducing’ infrastructure parameters of the IPCC.  That’s the reason the people, mostly urban poor, living in those settlements have the least resilience to climate change impacts.  According to the IIED report, for infrastructure, this lack of provision includes no paved roads and paths to each dwelling, no regular, good quality water piped to homes, inadequate or no provision for sanitation, waste water disposal, electricity, street lights and storm and surface drains. For services, this includes a lack of health care, emergency services, household waste collection and policing. The informal settlers of cities suffer all the above infrastructural and service issues.

Bit more details only about water and sanitation would make this evident.

According to UN estimates, while more than 700 million urban inhabitants, mostly in low and middle income countries, don’t have safely managed water; more than double of them – a whopping 1.6 billion – lack access to safely managed sanitation.

This makes them vulnerable to unsafe and contaminated water and unhygienic sanitation systems which get further aggravated by climate change.  Take for example the increased episodes of floods, cyclones and droughts due to climate change.  The people in the low lying lands and those with poor services will be impacted first and the most.

Building inclusive infrastructure

Cities are now being urged to lead the climate action from the front.  An assessment of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) done by the UN-Habitat found out in 2016 that almost over two-thirds of the countries included urban climate action as part of their national pledges. In fact, many cities are already taking steps to build climate resilience.  However, the informal cities, that are growing the fastest, seem to be falling off the map of climate actions for various reasons.  And they will continue to do so, if the ‘risk reducing’ capability of the basic infrastructure are not incorporated and supported in the urban climate action plans.

For local and city governments, there is urgent need to identify these vulnerabilities and strategize actions to make them climate resilient.  Among the top challenges, that the IIED paper highlights, legal entitlement of properties comes in way of the city planners in many places while making permanent provisions.  Ensuring housing has to be the first priority and along with that all other infrastructures and services be integrated in a phased manner.

The India scenario

In fact, many governments are already looking into these aspects.  Take for example the government of India and many state governments who have taken up various ambitious targets of building proper housing for all in urban areas and other infrastructure including water, toilets, wastewater management, etc under various schemes.  Most of these schemes are not being implemented as part of the climate action of the nation, will nonetheless contribute towards building climate resilience of the cities covering that of the informal settlements.  However, the progress of most of these schemes have to be monitored and accelerated in transparent ways with complete involvement of the communities, which is not happening at the moment.

A parliamentary panel has just pulled up the housing and urban affairs ministry of Govt. of India for poor utilisation of resources allocated to it for most of the flagship programmes that could help urban poor build climate resilience.  In a report, the parliamentary committee on housing and urban affairs, has said that, “as against a total fund allocation of Rs 48,548 crore for the six flagship programmes viz. AMRUT, HRIDAY, Smart Cities, Swachh Bharat, National Urban Livelihood Mission and PM Awas Yojna, the actual utilisation is only 21.6%, ie. Rs 7851 crore out of Rs 36194 crore released since the launch of these schemes.” This means the urban ministry has only been able to spend a meagre one-fifth of funds allocated to it for all these schemes since beginning (1 crore is approximately 160,000 USD).

There is need for reorienting the way urban infrastructure is being funded and schemes being implemented.  The cities should have more say in the same and city governments as well as people – most importantly the poor and vulnerable – should be taken on board for planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation – almost all phases of the infrastructure building and thereafter in the process of service provisioning.  Some schemes also need be modified to tune with the NDC of India.  Most of them are not talking about ‘green and natural infrastructure.’ That’s a big lacking which needs to be corrected without any further delay if cities want to be climate resilient in the real sense.

This article first appeared in Urban Update