One Earth Review

Approximately 1 billion people currently live in informal settlements, primarily in urban areas in low and middle income countries. Informal settlements are defined by poor-quality houses or shacks built outside formal laws and regulations. Most informal settlements lack piped water or adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, and public services. Many are on dangerous sites because their inhabitants have a higher chance of avoiding eviction. This paper considers how to build resilience to the impacts of climate change in informal settlements. It focuses on informal settlements in cities in low- and middle-income countries and how these concentrate at-risk populations. This paper also reviews what is being done to address climate resilience in informal settlements. In particular, community and city government led measures to upgrade settlements can enhance resilience to climate change risks and serve vulnerable groups. It also discusses how the barriers to greater scale and effectiveness can be overcome, including with synergies with the Sustainable Development Goals.

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Defining Climate Resilience in Informal Settlements

Within broader debates around climate change adaptation, there has been growing interest in the resilience of cities and communities to the impacts of climate change. In the broadest sense, resilience is defined as the capacity or ability of some- thing, someone, or some group to anticipate, accommodate, cope, adapt, or transform when exposed to specified hazards. The IPCC’s definition of resilience when applied to urban centers is the ability of urban centers (and their populations, en- terprises, and governments) and the systems on which they depend to anticipate, reduce, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner.
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Community and city government led measures to upgrade settlements can enhance resilience to climate change risks and serve vulnerable groups. Most upgrading programs were not designed as responses to climate change, but they can provide the foundation into which climate change resilience and disaster risk reduction can be fully integrated.

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Follow this link for this 10 page document about this quite important resilience issue =>