Adapting to Climate Change in Urban Areas

This paper discusses the possibilities and constraints for adaptation to climate change in urban areas in low- and middle-income nations. These contain a third of the world’s population and a large proportion of the people and economic activities most at risk from sea-level rise and from the heatwaves, storms and floods whose frequency and/or intensity climate change is likely to increase. Section I outlines both the potentials for adaptation and the constraints, with section II discussing the scale of urban change. Section III considers direct and indirect impacts of climate change on urban areas and discusses which nations, cities and population groups are particularly at risk. This highlights how prosperous, well-governed cities can generally adapt, at least for the next few decades – assuming global efforts at mitigation successfully halt and then reverse global emissions of greenhouse gases. But most of the world’s urban population lives in cities or smaller urban centres ill-equipped for adaptation – with weak and ineffective local governments and with very inadequate provision for the infrastructure and services needed to reduce climate-change-related risks and vulnerabilities. A key part of adaptation concerns infrastructure and buildings – but much of the urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America has no infrastructure to adapt – no all-weather roads, piped water supplies or drains – and lives in poor-quality housing in floodplains or on slopes at risk of landslides. Most international agencies have long refused to support urban programmes, especially those that address these problems. Section IV discusses innovations by urban governments and community organizations and in financial systems that address such problems, including the relevance of recent innovations in disaster-risk reduction for adaptation. But it notes how few city and national governments are taking any action on adaptation. Section V discusses how local innovation in adaptation can be encouraged and supported at national scale, and the funding needed to support this. Section VI considers the mechanisms for financing this and the larger ethical challenges that achieving adaptation raises – especially the fact that most climate-change-related urban (and rural) risks are in low-income nations with the least adaptive capacity, including many that have contributed very little to greenhouse-gas emissions.