AR6: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Cities, Settlements and Key Infrastructure

Executive Summary

Evidence from urban and rural settlements is unequivocal; climate impacts are felt disproportionately in urban communities, with the most economically and socially marginalised being most affected (high confidence). Vulnerabilities are shaped by drivers of inequality, including gender, class, race, ethnic origin, age, level of ability, sexuality and non-conforming gender orientation, framed by cultural norms, diverse values and practices (high confidence). Intersections between these drivers shape unique experiences of vulnerability and risk and the adaptive capacities of groups and individuals. Robust adaptation plans are those developed in inclusive ways. However, few adaptation plans for urban areas and infrastructure are being developed through consultation and co-production with diverse and marginalised urban communities. The concerns and capacities of marginalised communities are rarely considered in planning (medium confidence). {Box  6.3, Box  6.4; 6.4.3.1; 6.4.5.2, Case Study 6.7; Cross-Working Group Box URBAN in Chapter 6}

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Intersectional, gender-responsive and inclusive action can accelerate transformative climate change adaptation. The greatest gains in well-being in urban areas can be achieved by prioritising investment to reduce climate risk for low-income and marginalised residents and targeting informal settlements (high confidence). These approaches can advance equity and environmental justice over the long term in ways more likely to lead to outcomes that reduce vulnerability for all urban residents. Participatory planning for infrastructure provision and risk management to address climate change and underlying drivers of risk in informal and underserviced neighbourhoods, the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge, communication and efforts to build local leadership, especially among women and youth, are examples of inclusive approaches with co-benefits for equity. Providing opportunities for marginalised people, including women, to take on leadership and participation in local projects can enhance climate governance and its outcomes (high confidence). Since AR5 (IPCC, 2014), social movements in many cities, including movements led by youth, Indigenous and ethnic communities have also heightened public awareness about the need for urgent, inclusive action to achieve adaptation that can also enhance well-being. {6.1.5; 6.3.5; 6.4.1.2; 6.4.7; Box 6.6, Case study 6.2; Case study 6.4, FAQ6.3}

6.1 Introduction and Points of Departure

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6.1.5 Changes in the Global Enabling Environment

New urban activists and stakeholders, including youth, and Indigenous and minority communities and NGOs alongside business groups have also been visible in the global urban climate debate, pressing for faster, more far-reaching change (Frantzeskaki et al., 2016; O’Brien, Selboe and Hayward, 2018; Alves, Campos and Penha-Lopes, 2019; Smith and Patterson, 2018; Crnogorcevic, 2019; Campos et al., 2016; Hayward, 2021). Emergent urban social movements for climate justice often build on established international networks including local activists such as Shack and Slum Dwellers International, while others are inspired by Indigenous movements and are focused on human rights, indigenous sovereignty and land claims, access to water, intergenerational justice, and gender and youth movements coordinated on social media (Agyeman et  al., 2016; Cohen, 2018; Ulloa, 2017; Hayward, 2021; Prendergast et al., 2021). The emergence of climate justice movements in urban communities has the potential to reframe policy discussion in cities in ways that also bring inequality and climate justice to the fore (Sheller and Urry, 2016), underscoring growing public calls for more far-reaching, transformative changes toward socially just urban transformations (Akbulut et  al., 2019; Foran, 2019; Vandepitte, Vandermoere and Hustinx, 2019; Smith and Patterson, 2018).

6.2 Impacts and Risks

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6.2.3 Differentiated Human Vulnerability

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6.2.3.1 Urban Poverty and Vulnerability

In both developed and less-developed regions, poverty in urban areas is frequently associated with higher levels of vulnerability (Huq et al., 2020b). This is evident in both rural and urban settlements in a wide range of contexts, including the Philippines (Porio et al., 2019; Valenzuela, Esteban and Onuki, 2020); Bangladesh (Matsuyama, Khan and Khalequzzaman, 2020); Brazil (Lemos et  al., 2016), Santiago, Chile (Inostroza, Palme and de la Barrera, 2016); and New York City (Madrigano et al., 2015).

For individuals in urban communities, new literature highlights how differences in vulnerability established by social and economic processes are further differentiated by household and individual variability and intersectionality (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014; Kuran et al., 2020).This includes differences in wealth and capacity (Romero-Lankao, Gnatz and Sperling, 2016); gender and non-binary gender (Michael and Vakulabharanam, 2016; Sauer and Stieß, 2021; Mersha and van Laerhoven, 2018); education, health, political power and social capital (Lemos et al., 2016); age, including young and elderly, low physical fitness, pre-existing disability, length of residence and social and ethnic marginalisation (Inostroza, Palme and de la Barrera, 2016; Schuster et al., 2017; Malakar and Mishra, 2017). An increasing proportion of refugees and displaced people now live in urban centres, and their characteristics also make them vulnerable to a range of shocks and stresses (Earle, 2016). While some individuals, including children, may be able to exercise agency to reduce their risk (Treichel, 2020), and some indicators are culturally specific, overall, poor, marginalised, socially isolated and informal urban households are particularly at risk (high confidence) (Brown and McGranahan, 2016; Kim et al., 2020b; Huq et al., 2020a; Huq et al., 2020b).

6.2.3.3 Migration and Differentiated Vulnerability

(...) Migration, including rural–urban migration, is also recognised as an adaptation strategy in some circumstances, whether this is voluntary or planned (Jamero et al., 2019; Esteban et al., 2020a; Bettini, 2014). Voluntary migration can be an element of household strategies to diversify risk, depending on the nature of the climatic stress, and interacts with household composition, individual characteristics, social networks, and historical, political and economic contexts (Hunter, Luna and Norton, 2015; Carmin et al., 2015; Hayward et al., 2020). For example, in Colombia, rural to urban migration is differentiated across gender depending on the climatic stress whereby men migrate due to droughts, while women migrate due to excessive rain triggers (Tovar-Restrepo and Irazábal, 2013). Especially in Pacific small island developing states, migration can be a strategy for urban settlements or tribal communities to relocate in customary areas, as in the case of Vunidogoloa in Fiji (McMichael, Katonivualiku and Powell, 2019; Hayward et al., 2020); it can be a livelihood strategy as shown in the Cataret Islands in Papua New Guinea (Connell, 2016); or it can be used to enhance education and international networks (i.e., voluntary ‘migration with dignity’) as is the case in Kiribati (Heslin et al., 2019; Voigt-Graf and Kagan, 2017). (...)

6.3 Adaptation Pathways

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6.3.5 Adaptation Through Grey/Physical Infrastructure

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6.3.5.3 Information and Communication Technology

The selection and use of ICTs for adaptation needs to be fairly grounded in the broader socio-cultural, economic, political and institutional context, to ensure that these tools effectively help address existing, emerging and future adaptive needs. Typically, ICT is inadequate on its own to make a significant difference (Toya and Skidmore, 2015). The role of ICTs in adaptive pathways is influenced by the availability of locally relevant information (e.g., weather-based advisory messages, local market prices), the accessibility of information by all members of the community (e.g., using various text, audio and visual content, local languages, addressing gender-related exclusion, cost and digital competencies) and the applicability of information at the appropriate scale (local, regional or national), including data quality and verification (Namukombo, 2016; Haworth et al., 2018).

Information privacy and security, as well as the unintended impacts of ICTs on inequality, spread of misinformation and on widening existing gaps (e.g., due to poverty, gender and power differentials), can also constrain the contribution of ICTs to urban adaptation (Haworth et al., 2018; Coletta and Kitchin, 2017; Leszczynski, 2016) and are among the key challenges that need to be addressed in order to fully realise their potential.

6.3.6 Cross-Cutting Themes

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6.3.6.1 Equity and Justice

Questions of equity and justice influence adaptation pathways for cities, settlements and infrastructure (see also Chapter 8). Although infrastructure, ranging from social to ecological and physical to digital, can help to reduce the impacts of climate change (Stewart and Deng, 2014; Baró Porras et al., 2021), there is limited evidence of how infrastructures, implemented to reduce climate risk, also reduce inequality. Rather, there is more evidence to suggest that both adaptation plans and associated infrastructure implementation pathways are increasing inequality in cities and settlements (Chu, Anguelovski and Carmin, 2016; Anguelovski et  al., 2016; Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2019). Social, economic and cultural structures that marginalise people by race, class, ethnicity and gender all contribute in complex ways to climate injustices and need to be urgently addressed for adaptation options to shift to benefit those most vulnerable, rather than mainly benefitting the already privileged and maintaining the status quo (Thomas et al., 2019; Porter et al., 2020; Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019). Innovation and imagination are needed in adaptation responses to ensure that cities and settlements shift from perpetuating structural domination and inequality to fairer cities (Porter et  al., 2020; Henrique and Tschakert, 2019; Parnell, 2016b). To support these possibilities, this section explores adaptation through the lens of distributive and procedural justice. Although not expanded on here, spatial and recognition injustices are equally important (Fisher, 2015; Chu and Michael, 2018; Campello Torres et  al., 2020). Recognition can be supported through a capabilities approach that helps to bring attention to past cultural domination and enable citizens to develop the functioning life they choose (Schlosberg, Collins and Niemeyer, 2017). This brings a focus on local action, emphasising the relevance to vulnerability reduction and resilience building of individual and local/community capacities and supporting structures. This blurs the distinction between climate change adaptation and community development, with the former firmly embedded in the latter. Struggles for recognition are deeply political and central to adaptation responses which requires increased focus on power to support more equitable and just adaptation (Nightingale, 2017). Justice questions are not static, Box  6.4 overviews the implications of COVID-19 for urban justice and vulnerability.

6.4 Enabling Conditions for Adaptation Action in Urban Areas, Settlements and Infrastructure

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6.4.3 Solution Spaces to Address the ‘Policy Action Gap’

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6.4.3.1 Delivers on the Needs of the Most Vulnerable

Success in urban adaptation is most often understood as requiring measurable outcomes and evaluation (see also Section 6.4.6). However, many adaptation outcomes are not measurable (medium evidence, medium agreement) (Béné et  al., 2018). Adaptation action solely focused on action tends to ignore areas in the city for which there is no existing data even though actions in these areas may play an essential role in shaping resilience and its limits. Informal settlements and informal economies, which are integral in managing urban resources for effective climate adaptation, are not routinely included in formal urban and national monitoring(Guibrunet and Castán Broto, 2016). The resulting understanding and monitoring of city needs, capacities and actions that feed into policy is incomplete. The innovation, as well as particular concerns and capacities of the informal sector, which is often highly gendered, are not always measured (Brown and McGranahan, 2016). An emphasis on measurable adaptation outcomes may lead to prioritising techno-economic measures to adaptation at the local level. Technocratic approaches to environmental policy continue to shape local sustainability politics (Bulkeley, 2015). The deployment of such technocratic approaches at the local scale is detrimental for democratic and collaborative practices (Metzger and Lindblad, 2020). For example, while China has received praise in terms of delivering urban policies that put climate change at its core, thus suggesting its role providing leadership in climate change debates (Liu et al., 2014; Wang and He, 2015; Fu and Zhang, 2017), other analyses suggest that processes of planning should take greater account of certain groups and interests (Westman and Broto, 2018). Urban sustainability policy may, as a result, fail to deliver collaborative social and environmental objectives, and this is maladaptive in terms of CRD.

6.4.3.2 Moves from Mainstreaming to Transformative Adaptation

Two forms of mainstreaming are usually found in urban policy: incorporating climate adaptation into different sectors or incorporating climate adaptation in holistic sustainability or resilience plans, linking climate adaptation objectives with other social and development objectives (Reckien et  al., 2019; Fainstein, 2018). The integration of climate adaptation in local policies in cities and settlements has often been seen as maintaining business-as-usual and not always aligned with transformative efforts to address structural drivers of vulnerability (high confidence). For example, mainstream actions that seek to advance other development objectives, as explained above, may reduce adaptation to ‘low-hanging fruits’, which may maintain business-as-usual practices without any fundamental transformation of the social, institutional and economic systems that drive vulnerabilities (Aylett, 2014). However, as explained above, mainstreaming can also generate wider processes of institutional change (Section 6.4.2). Mainstream strategies may help to demonstrate how policy and frameworks can produce practical outcomes on the ground (Biesbroek and Delaney, 2020). However, previous experiences in other sectors, such as gender mainstreaming, have shown the limitations of the mainstreaming approach, particularly in terms of addressing the structural drivers of inequality and vulnerability, and in achieving justice for those who suffer most (Moser, 2017). Local governments in particular, can link mainstreaming efforts with specific strategies that support justice in adaptation, including redistribution efforts to address vulnerabilities (see Section  6.3.2), representation in local institution and deliberative processes, and recognition of the conditions for self-realisation, including personal and collective safety (Agyeman et al., 2016; Castán Broto and Westman, 2017; Castán Broto and Westman, 2019; Hess and McKane, 2021).

6.4.3.5 Addresses Inequalities through Intersectional Perspectives

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Intersectional strategies of action seek to consider the multiple forms of structural oppression experienced at the local level (Grunenfelder and Schurr, 2015) and, in the context of adaptation, explain how they produce or exacerbate vulnerabilities. For example, intersectionality ties with the idea of how multiple deprivations shape access to services (from sanitation to health and education) and the exposition to environmental risks (Sicotte, 2014; Lau and Scales, 2016; Van Aelst and Holvoet, 2016; Lievanos and Horne, 2017; Raza, 2017; Yon and Nadimpalli, 2017; European Environment Agency, 2020) (see Box 6.6 on the participation of women in local decision making bodies). For example, fisherwomen in the western coast of India rely on a complex arrangement of relationships around categories of class, caste and gender that shapes their possibilities to draw political resources to maintain their livelihoods and, hence, influence the dynamics of transformation (Thara, 2016). Intersectionality is central to build resilience across communities, rather than in particular areas (Khosla and Masaud, 2010; Reckien et  al., 2017). Including intersectionality deliberately in partnerships with communities can empower socially excluded groups and highlight justice issues while aligning agendas with local development priorities (Castán Broto et al., 2015a). Despite the high confidence on the growing importance of intersectionality concerns in the delivery of just environmental policies, there is limited evidence of its explicit inclusion in adaptation policies.

6.4.3.5 Addresses Inequalities through Intersectional Perspectives

(...) To respond to urban injustices, attention needs to be paid to both the local level and to broader system-wide governance issues (that are unpacked further in Section 6.4). At the local level, it is important to understand who is most vulnerable to climate risk, which is likely to be related to class, race, gender, ability and age (Wilby and Keenan, 2012; Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019; Thomas, Cretney and Hayward, 2019). Factors such as age and levels of ability, as well as those pursuing outdoor livelihoods, have a direct link to higher vulnerability to heat stress (Conry et al., 2015). In least-developed countries, less than 60% of the urban population have access to piped water which impacts on health and well-being, and emphasises the importance of alternative resources for these households (World Health Organization, Nations and Fund, 2017).

6.4.6 Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks for Adaptation Used in Cities, Settlements and Infrastructures

(...) On the one hand, there is a need to guarantee that planned adaptation actions are efficient, just and equitable (Olazabal et al., 2019b), including being able to disaggregate, for example by gendered impacts. On the other hand, there is a need to observe if and how environmental, social and economic vulnerability and climatic risk conditions evolve with time. Surveillance, monitoring and evaluation facilitate adaptation decision making by linking three aspects (Berrang-Ford et al., 2019): (1) changing vulnerabilities and risks, (2) established adaptation goals and targets, and (3) adaptation efforts put in place. The process will help evaluate whether current adaptation efforts are sufficient or adequate, thus enabling the learning process that adaptation action requires (Haasnoot, van’t Klooster and Van Alphen, 2018; Klostermann et al., 2018). (...)

6.4.7 Enabling Transformations

(...) The integration of multiple forms of knowledge leads to social learning (medium evidence, high agreement). Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge can provide essential insights into community needs and experiences of housing and urban infrastructure to inform climate adaptation, including improper waste disposal, inadequate drainage and poor sanitation, but there is significant variation in community knowledge networks (Roy et al., 2018b; Douglas et al, 2018; Waters and Adger, 2017). It is important to identify and address barriers to the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge, such as the dominance of scientific knowledge, oppression and/or racism, and fragmentation of knowledge including gender and generational divides (see Burke and Heynen, 2014; Whyte, 2017; Victor, 2015; Lövbrand et  al., 2015; Kelly, 2019).The incorporation of Indigenous knowledge in urban decision making requires a constructive dialogue with scientists and urban planners. (...)

Case Studies

Case Study 6.1: Urbanisation and Climate Change in the Himalayas: Increased Water Insecurity for the Poor

One of the major challenges of urbanisation in the Himalayas is sprawling small towns with populations of under 100,000 (see Figure 6.6). These towns are expected to become major urban centres within a decade because of high growth rate. A recent study by Maharjan et al. (2018) on migration documented that 39% of rural communities have at least one migrant, of whom 80% are internal and the remaining 20% are international. Around 10% of the migration is reported as environmental displacement. Males account for the majority of the migration, which forms an important aspect of gendered vulnerability (Sugden et al., 2014; Goodrich, Prakash and Udas, 2019). The ever-expanding urban population in the Himalayas generates many challenges, especially in the context of climate change adaptation. First, unplanned urbanisation is causing significant changes in land use and land cover, with recharge areas of springs being reduced. Most of the towns in Hindu Kush Himalayan region meet their water needs using supplies from springs, ponds and lakes which are largely interlinked systems. Water insecurity in hill towns are becoming the order of the day (Virk et  al., 2019; Bharti et  al., 2019; Singh et  al., 2019a; Sharma et al., 2019). Second, climate-induced changes in the physical environment include increased rainfall variability. Due to this, heavy rains are becoming frequent and are leading to more landslides. Third, global warming has increased the average temperature in the Himalayas which has caused glacier melt and subsequent change in hydrological regimes of the region. One of the contributing factors of glacial decline is also the deposition of black carbon (Gautam et al., 2020; Gul et al., 2021) which is contributed by burning of crop residue in Punjab (Kant et al., 2020). These critical stressors, climatic and non-climatic, are adversely affecting the socioecology of urban conglomerations in the region (Pervin et  al., 2019). Encroachment or degradation of natural water bodies and the disappearance of traditional water systems such as springs are evident (Shah and Badiger, 2018; Sharma et al., 2019). While water availability in these towns has been adversely affected by the climatic and socioeconomic changes, demand for water has increased greatly (Molden, Khanal and Pradhan, 2018). Some of the towns are major tourist attractions that create a floating population in peak tourist seasons, challenging the carrying capacities of the towns. The residents must cope with water scarcity as the demand for water increases in peak seasons and water distribution through the public water supply systems becomes highly inequitable (Raina, Gurung and Suwal, 2018). The usual challenges of utilities being inefficient also applies in these areas, though it becomes much more critical as the sources of water are limited and the local geology limits the ability to access groundwater. All these processes are resulting in increased water insecurity for the poor and marginalised in urban towns of Hindu Kush (Prakash and Molden, 2020). To cope with the scarcity situation, people are adapting through various means such as rationing of intra-household water access and groundwater extraction to access water supply (Virk et al., 2019; Bharti et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2019). This is due to lack of long-term strategies and options provided by utilities.