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Urban Resilience through Community-Based Adaptation in Egypt April 16, 2013

Vulnerability, Resilience, and the potential for

Community-Based Adaptation in low-income and informal

urban settlements

Dr David Dodman david.dodman@iied.org

Large and increasing risks from climate change for large and growing numbers of people in urban areas of low- and middle-income countries

Increasing scale and number of catastrophic impacts if emissions are not reduced

Very little association between people that cause climate change and those facing most serious impacts

Huge challenges for adapting low-income countries and cities: financial, technical, political

Those most at risk cannot address underlying causes: low historical emissions, low present-day consumption

Climate Change and Urban Development: Some Big Issues

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Outline

Vulnerability, Resilience and Community-Based Adaptation

• ‘Urban’ dimensions of vulnerability and resilience

• Revisiting Vulnerability: framing the problem shapes the solutions

• Understanding Resilience: strategic approaches in cities

• The contribution of Community Based Approaches: from coping to transformation?

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2012). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm.

urba

n po

pula

tion

(mill

ions

)

—

1,000,000

2,000,000

3,000,000

4,000,000

5,000,000

6,000,000

7,000,000

Oceania

Northern America

Latin America and the Caribbean

Europe

Asia

Africa

Vulnerability to Climate Change in an Urbanizing World

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Vulnerability to Climate Change in an Urbanizing World

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2012). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm.

—

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

50.0

60.0

70.0

80.0

90.0

100.0

Africa Asia Europe Latin America &Caribbean

Northern America Oceania

1950

2000

2050

prop

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pop

ulat

ion

in u

rban

are

as

[Source: Parry et al (2009). ‘Overshoot, adapt and recover’. Nature 458, 30 April 2009.]

Understanding Urban Vulnerability

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[Source: Hunt A, Watkiss P (2011). ‘Climate change impacts and adaptation in cities: a review of the literature’ Climatic Change 104: 13-49]

Urban Climate Change Vulnerability: the evidence base

[Source: Hunt A, Watkiss P (2011). ‘Climate change impacts and adaptation in cities: a review of the literature’ Climatic Change 104: 13-49]

“... tools for urban climate impact assessment are lacking... most existing analyses investigate only the physical vulnerability of cities to the direct impacts of weather and climate events”

Hallegatte and Corfee-Morlot (2011, p5)

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Bacon Poblacion,

Sorsogon, Philippines

Vulnerability to climate change:

exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity

Factors shaping (urban) vulnerability

[Source: Romero Lankao P, Qin H (2010). ‘Conceptualizing urban vulnerability to global climate and environmental change’ COSUST 3: 142-149.]

6

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Factors shaping (urban) vulnerability

“Crunch” Pressure and Release Model (Terry Cannon et al.)

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Informality and Vulnerability

• informal settlements often more exposed to particular hazards (lack of hazard-reducing infrastructure)

• insecure tenure restricts access to various urban ‘rights’ (voting, access to education and healthcare, social security)

• lack of access to services (electricity, water)

• insecure livelihoods

• contribute to high sensitivity and low levels of adaptive capacity

Exposure

Who lives or works in the locations most exposed to hazards related to the direct or indirect impacts of climate change?

Who lives or works in locations lacking the infrastructure that reduces risk?

Whose homes and neighbourhoods face greatest risks when impacts occur?

Social Dimensions: What makes people vulnerable?

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Adaptive Capacity

Who lacks knowledge, capacity and opportunities to take immediate short-term measures to limit impacts?

Who is least able to cope with impacts?

Who is least able to adapt to avoid impacts? [Source: Hardoy J, Pandiella G (2009) ‘Urban poverty and vulnerability to climate change in Latin America’ Environment and Urbanization 21(1): 203-224] Lusaka, Zambia

Social Dimensions: What makes people vulnerable?

Social Dimensions: Vulnerability and Gender Aspect of

vulnerability Contribution to urban vulnerability Contribution to climate vulnerability

Gendered division of labour and ‘poverty of time’

Women have prime responsibility for ‘reproductive’ labour; lack of time to engage in ‘productive’ labour

Limited financial assets to build resilience and to cope with disaster events

Gender-ascribed social responsibilities

Women have prime responsibility for ‘reproductive’ labour; lack of time to engage in ‘productive’ labour

Additional domestic responsibilities when access to food, water and sanitation are disrupted; additional time required to care for young, sick and elderly

Cultural expectations of gender norms

Constraints on women’s mobility and involvement in certain activities

Higher mortality from disaster events due to lack of skills and knowledge

Unequal entitlements to land and property

Limited access to productive resources Limited ability to invest in more resilient land or shelter

Higher representation of women in informal sector

Lower wages and lack of financial security

Damage to homes and neighbourhoods affects women’s incomes more severely as income-earning activities are often undertaken at home

Safety and security in public spaces

Limited freedom to use public space Particular problem in temporary accommodation / relocation sites; high rates of sexual abuse and violence

Limited engagement of women in planning processes

Urban plans fail to meet particular needs of women and children

Climate adaptation plans fail to meet needs of women and children; reduced aversion to risk (?)

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“The ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change” (IPCC 2008).

“same basic structure”?

• one billion people live on less than $1 per day

• 350-500 million cases of malaria each year

• half of the people living in African and Asian cities lack adequate water and sanitation

Conceptualising (Urban) Resilience

[Source: Tiempo (2006)]

Resilient Infrastructure?

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[Source: Jabeen et al. (2009)]

Resilient Infrastructure?

Key Sectors for Urban Resilience

• economic base: including support for vulnerable sectors and households

• food and biomass: including urban agriculture, links with rural areas

• housing and settlement: adapting for extreme heat, disaster preparedness

• water: supply- and demand-side adaptations

• sanitation and drainage: increasingly critical

• electricity, energy, transport, telecommunications: wide range of knock-on effects

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Systems approaches to resilience, or three assessments of one programme [Brown et al. (2012); da Silva et al. (2012); Tyler and Moench (2012)]

• Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN): www.acccrn.org

• 10 secondary cities in four countries (India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam)

• large multi-year programme funded by Rockefeller Foundation

[Source: Brown A, Dayal A, Rumbaitis del Rio C (2012). ‘From practice to theory: emerging lessons from Asia for building urban climate change resilience’ Environment and Urbanization 24(2): 531-556.]

Critical urban climate change resilience action areas

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[Source: da Silva J, Kernaghan S, Luque A (2012). ‘A systems approach to meeting the challenges of urban climate change’ International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development 4(2): 125-145.]

Compound effect of climate impacts

[Source: Tyler S, Moench M (2012). ‘A framework for urban climate resilience’ Climate and Development 4(4): 311-326.]

Urban systems and resilience planning

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Framing the problem… towards transformation?

“The extent to which adaptation to climate change can embrace transformation will depend on the framing of the climate change problem. Where vulnerability is attributed to proximate causes of unsafe buildings, inappropriate land use and fragile demographics adaptation will be framed as a local concern [resilience / transition]. However, if vulnerability is framed as an outcome of wider social processes shaping how people see themselves and others, their relationship with the environment and role in political processes, then adaptation becomes a much broader problem [transformation].”

Pelling M (2011). Adaptation to Climate Change: from resilience to transformation. London, Routledge. (p85)

Community Based Adaptation:

Asset-Based Approaches to Development

• assets may be physical, financial, human, social, or natural

• assets do not exist in a vacuum but are influenced by a range of external factors (government policy, NGOs, legal framework, social norms)

• household asset portfolios change over time

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Community-Based Adaptation:

Asset-Based Approaches to Climate Change

Asset vulnerability: recognizes multi-dimensional nature of poverty and wellbeing; vulnerability as a process of the erosion of assets

Asset-based adaptation: stresses the role of assets in increasing the capacity of low-income households and communities to adapt to climate change; protecting assets as a key component of adaptation

Practical interventions: supporting households to improve physical assets (e.g. upgrading housing) or to protect productive assets; upgrading of city infrastructure

Community-Based Adaptation

• based on premise that local communities have skills, experience, knowledge and networks to undertake locally appropriate activities to increase resilience

• identified as an effective mechanism for development, research and policy where adaptive capacity is linked with livelihood opportunities

• generates adaptation strategies through participatory processes involving local stakeholders

• builds on existing cultural norms and addresses local development issues that underlie vulnerability

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Ecosystem-Based Adaptation

• human livelihoods invariably rely on resources and services provided by natural systems / ecological resilience influenced by human behaviour

• urban areas depend on ecosystem services (air filtration, micro-climate regulation, noise reduction, rainwater drainage, sewage treatment, recreation) – ecological footprints

• ecosystems can support urban climate resilience (e.g. trees and woodlands can reduce flood risk and offset urban heat islands)

• therefore need to integrate ‘social’ and ‘ecological’ resilience

Ecosystem Services and Climate Resilience

Green roofs / walls

Street trees

Wetlands River corridors

Woodlands Grasslands

Reduce flood risk

Offset urban heat island

Reduce energy demand

Reduce noise / air pollution

Support biodiversity

Recreation / leisure

[Source: Greater London Authority (2008)]

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Community Based Approaches:

avoiding adaptation and mitigation pitfalls

• cannot separate adaptation to ‘climate change’ from adaptation to other environmental hazards

• NAPAs and NAPS: little focus on urban areas

• rigorous building and infrastructure standards: potentially costly and inappropriate?

• vulnerability and risk mapping: legitimating removal of informal settlements?

• does mitigation draw attention away from conditions and needs of low-income residents?

• does mitigation come with additional ‘costs’ that are allocated unfairly?

Adaptation to Climate Change:

Unintended Consequences?

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Climate Change Mitigation:

Unintended Consequences?

Economics of Community-Based Adaptation

• CBA generates a wide range of benefits: not only wealth for communities (economic benefits), but also social and environmental benefits (double dividends)

• modelling of costs of CBA interventions shows that these are cheaper than the costs of not intervening to address climate change and extreme weather events

• CBA support for ‘soft’ adaptation is critical to ensure that ‘hard’ adaptation functions effectively

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Challenges for Community-Based Adaptation

• Too local? Adaptation challenges in cities require action at a range of scales (including critical infrastructure services).

• Not sufficiently political? Building urban resilience requires governance changes (accountability, responsiveness).

• Too simplistic? Communities are not homogeneous: range of power relations exist.

Community Based Approaches: from coping to transformation?

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Tandale, Dar es Salaam

Household responses in Tanzania: coping, resilience or transformation?

[Source: Jabeen et al. (2009)]

Household responses in Bangladesh: coping, resilience or transformation?

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Iloilo, Philippines

Community responses in the Philippines: coping, resilience or transformation?

Crowborough, Harare, Zimbabwe

Community responses in Zimbabwe: coping, resilience or transformation?

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Simon Bolivar,

Santo Domingo,

Dominican Republic

Community responses in the Dominican Republic: coping, resilience or transformation?

Simon Bolivar,

Santo Domingo,

Dominican Republic

“The most effective adaptation and disaster risk reduction actions are those that offer development benefits in the relatively near term, as well as reductions in vulnerability over the longer-term (high agreement, medium evidence)”

IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events – Summary for Policymakers (2011, p15)

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Getting Density Right: for communities and cities

• how can tightly contained, heavily populated, shared spaces be made to work best – for residents and for the natural systems that cities depend on?

• shelter: meeting the need for homes

• livelihoods: locations that support economic activity

• adaptation: reducing exposure and vulnerability to climate change

• mitigation: facilitating lower emissions

• examples from Karachi: www.urbandensity.org

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[Source: IPCC (2012). Special Report on Extreme Events: Summary for Policy Makers. Figure 2.

Approaches to Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management

Potential for

Transformative

Community-Based

Approaches?