Adapting Cities to Climate Change

Understanding and Addressing the Development Challenges

David Dodman, Jane Bicknell, David Satterthwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136572531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This volume brings together, for the first time, a wide-ranging and detailed body of information identifying and assessing risk, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in urban centres in low- and middle-income countries. Framed by an overview of the main possibilities and constraints for adaptation, the contributors examine the implications of climate change for cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and propose innovative agendas for adaptation. The book should be of interest to policy makers, practitioners and academics who face the challenge of addressing climate change vulnerability and adaptation in urban centres throughout the global South.

Published with E&U and International Institute for Environment and Development

1

Introduction

1

Adapting to Climate Change in Urban Areas: The Possibilities and Constraints in Low- and Middle-Income Nations¹

David Satterthwaite, Saleemul Huq, Hannah Reid, Mark Pelling and Patricia Romero Lankao

Introduction

The lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by what is done (or not done) in urban centres with regard to climate change over the next five to ten years. Urban centres are key players both in the generation of greenhouse gases and in strategies to reduce this generation, especially in reducing dependence upon carbon-based fuels.² They also concentrate a large proportion of those most at risk from the effects of climate change – and the enterprises that generate most of the gross world product (GWP). While the need for city and municipal governments and civil society groups to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is well established – with many city governments in Europe and North America and some in other regions already acting on this – the need to act to reduce urban residents’ vulnerability to the many direct and indirect impacts of climate change is not. In addition, most of the urban centres (and nations) that face the highest risks from the negative effects of climate change are those with small contributions to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; most also have serious constraints on their capacity to adapt to these effects.

This introductory chapter seeks to provide a brief overview of the key issues that are addressed in more depth and detail in Chapters 2 to 15. It also provides some background on the scale and nature of urban change in low- and middle-income nations, and considers why more attention needs to be paid both to understanding urban contexts and to urban governance frameworks for effective adaptation.

The Potential for Adaptation

As the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes, urban centres and the infrastructure they concentrate – and the industries that are a key part of many such centres’ economic bases – are often capable of considerable adaptation in order to reduce risks from the direct and indirect impacts of climate change.³ All large urban centres have had to make very large ‘adaptations’ to environmental conditions, site characteristics, natural resources availability and environmental hazards to be able to function – for instance, creating stable sites for buildings, putting in place the infrastructure that all cities require, and ensuring provision for water and for managing wastewater and storm and surface runoff. Successful and healthy cities are proof of the adaptation capacities of their governments, citizens and enterprises. In any well-governed city, there is already a great range of measures in place to ensure that buildings and infrastructure can withstand extreme weather events and that water supply systems can cope with variations in freshwater supplies. Good environmental and public health services should also be able to cope with any increase in other likely climate change-related health risks in the next few decades – whether this is from heat waves or reduced freshwater availability or greater risks from certain communicable diseases.

Thus, it is easy to envisage a process through which urban planning and management ensures planned adaptation – with developments and investments in and around each urban area reducing the risks for inhabitants, enterprises and infrastructure from climate change-related impacts. So, over time, this adapts the building stock, the industrial base, the infrastructure and the spread of urban development to the risks that these changes bring. The tools and methods required to do this are well known and their effectiveness has been demonstrated in many locations – for instance, adjustments to building codes, land subdivision regulations and infrastructure standards, combined with land-use planning that restricts buildings in high-risk areas and makes special provision for extreme events, including the use of insurance to spread risk and emergency services able to act swiftly when needed. An inventory of industries and other activities with the potential to cause serious secondary problems (such as fire or chemical contamination) when a disaster happens is also necessary. There is a well-established literature on the importance of integrating disaster preparedness within urban and peri-urban development, and this disaster preparedness also needs integrating within adaptation. For large well-established cities, there are often particular problems with adjusting existing buildings, infrastructure and land-use patterns to the new or heightened risks that climate change will or may bring; but these can generally be addressed by long-term policies that make these affordable by spreading the cost over long periods and by making use of potential synergies between reducing climate change risks and reducing other environmental risks. Most of the risks from climate change in the next few decades heighten other risks that are already present.

In addition, all low-income and most middle-income nations have what might be considered an advantage in that much of their ‘urbanization’ is to come in the next few decades and, since it has not yet taken place, it can be planned and managed in ways that accommodate the increased risks that climate change is likely to bring. This can include measures to channel new urban growth away from high-risk sites – for instance, from cities or city sites at high risk of moderate sea-level rise and storm surges. There are some particular worries with regard to the impact of the needed measures on housing and basic services for low-income groups: higher building and infrastructure standards and land-use restrictions (including avoiding new constructions on floodplains) could mean rising land and housing prices and much reduced supplies of cheap accommodation; but special measures can be taken to ensure sufficient supplies of well-located serviced land for new housing. It is also easy to envisage this process addressing disasters and other environmental hazards unrelated to climate change – for instance, improved drainage and provision for coping with occasional heavy concentrated rainfall that has long been a risk (and often produces serious flooding). It is also easy to envisage this process incorporating measures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is evidence from some cities in low- and middle-income nations of the kinds of discussions within their governments on what local adaptations may be needed that can underpin good long-term planning for, and investment in, adaptation – as shown by Debra Roberts’s discussion of Durban’s adaptation plans in Chapter 11.

Thus, when problems concerning urban areas’ adaptation to climate change are considered, independent of current conditions and government structures, it is easy to conceive of a long-term process of support and funding for adaptation. At least in the next 50 years or so, assuming that none of the uncertain but potentially catastrophic climate change impacts take place,⁴ it seems that this might produce the necessary adaptations in most locations without high costs. Certain cities, smaller urban centres and rural districts face far more serious risks than others; but it is possible to envisage an international funding system that gives special attention to helping them adapt. It is also possible to envisage national adaptation strategies that encourage and support urban development away from the areas most at risk from climate change-related impacts. Most governments and many international agencies have officially endorsed recommendations to move in this direction – as in, for instance, the Hyogo Framework for Action.⁵

The Constraints on Implementation

It would be a mistake to assume that the above – a logical, justifiable, fundable process driven by good science – provides a viable roadmap for action. The examples of evolving good practice for adaptation in this book represent exceptions and it is important to understand why this is so. It is easy for national governments to sign declarations at international conferences that recommend all the needed measures – and then ignore them.

The best indication of the constraints on implementing adaptation comes from the last 50 to 60 years of ‘development’. During the 1950s, it was easy to envisage a process by which international funding for ‘productive activities’ and the required infrastructure allied to ‘technical assistance’ would rapidly reduce poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet, more than five decades later, the number of people suffering extreme poverty is much larger than it was in the 1950s. Indeed, there was a need to launch the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 precisely to focus attention on the vast scale of unmet needs, despite four ‘development decades’. During the 1970s, many international agencies committed themselves to a new focus on ‘meeting basic needs’, with detailed costings of what additional funding this would require; four decades later, the number of people lacking access to the most ‘basic needs’ is higher than it was in the 1970s. Today, there are more urban dwellers living in very poor quality, overcrowded housing lacking basic infrastructure and services in low- and middle-income nations than their entire urban populations in 1975.⁶

Much of the physical growth and economic expansion in most cities in low- and middle-income nations takes place outside any official plan and outside official rules and regulations. This is also the case for most new housing that is being built. In part, this is because large sections of the population could never afford a house that met official standards (and often the standards are unrealistic and their implementation cumbersome and costly). In part, it is because of a very large mismatch between the growth of urban centres’ economic bases and populations and the competence, capacity and accountability of local government structures. There are important exceptions and these can be held up as examples of ‘good practice’; but the political and economic circumstances that underpinned their good practice are rarely transferable.

In urban centres in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, hundreds of millions of people live in accommodation that is of poor quality, with particular problems in relation to overcrowding, unsafe structures, insecure tenure and inadequate provision for infrastructure, including that needed for water, sanitation and drainage.⁷ Another indication of the scale of urban problems is the number of people living in illegal settlements because they cannot afford to buy, build or rent legal accommodation. In urban areas, it has now become the norm rather than the exception for high proportions of urban dwellers to live in informal settlements; it is common for cities to have 30 to 50 per cent of their entire population living in settlements that developed illegally.⁸ With regard to infrastructure, estimates for 2000 suggested that more than 680 million urban dwellers lacked adequate provision for water and 850 million or more lacked adequate provision for sanitation.⁹ There are no estimates on deficiencies in drainage infrastructure; but the lack of provision for sewers gives some indication of deficiencies here. Most urban centres in low-income nations have no sewers at all or sewers that only serve a small proportion of the population.¹⁰ Statistics on infant and child mortality rates for urban populations show that these are often 5 to 20 times what they should be if families had adequate incomes, reasonable quality housing and good healthcare.¹¹ There are also many case studies focusing on low-income urban populations that show very large health burdens from diseases that should be easily prevented or cured – for instance, diarrhoeal diseases, intestinal parasites, tuberculosis, malaria, dengue fever and acute respiratory infections.¹²

In addition, we cannot consider the ‘adaptation’ that cities must make with regard to climate change independent of the often very large deficits or deficiencies in basic infrastructure (including storm and surface drains). It makes no sense to discuss the vulnerability of urban populations to climate change and responses to it separately from their current and often long-established vulnerability to climate variability, including extreme weather events. There is a long history of cities being seriously affected by climate variability that has nothing to do with human-induced climate change. In addition, the Asian tsunami of 2004 demonstrated the vulnerability of so many coastal settlements (urban and rural), or specific populations within them, to the risk of flooding and storm surges, even if an earthquake did cause them. The key here is to understand how the processes that shape urbanization create or exacerbate risk – to climate variability, to the direct and less direct impacts of climate change and to other hazards unrelated to climate change or variability. At an international level, there may be a desire to separate ou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 The Rising Tide: Assessing the Risks of Climate Change and Human Settlements in Low-Elevation Coastal Zones
• Part 3 Case Studies on Adaptation
• Part 4 Moving Forward
• Index