Equity, Environmental Justice, and Urban Climate Change (2024)

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures, 2022

In any hazard risk studies, protecting vulnerable groups should be addressed while people have different capacities and levels of resilience to risk. In this entry, we promote the analysis of vulnerability to climate-driven hazards by applying the intersectionality prospect. We call for intersectionality as a qualitative approach that can foster the resilience of social dimensions while it gives a better understanding of vulnerable groups. Intersectionality is a sociodemographic profile of society and addresses hidden inequities of communities. This study studied three Climate-Driven Urban Practices to identify the way vulnerability and equity are addressed in terms of intersectionality. This study invites practitioners and policymakers to investigate, monitor, and control the hazard exposure and sensitivity at the individual and social levels.

Local Environment, 2019

A growing number of cities are incorporating resilience into their plans and policies to respond to shocks, stresses, and uncertainties. While some scholars advocate for the potential of resilience research and practice, others argue that it promotes an inherently conservative and neoliberal agenda, prevents systemic transformations, and pays insufficient attention to power, politics, and justice. Notably, critics of the urban resilience agenda argue that policies fail to adequately address social equity issues. This study seeks to inform these debates by providing a cross-sectional analysis of how issues of equity are incorporated into urban resilience planning. We develop a tripartite framework of equity that includes distributional, recognitional, and procedural dimensions and use it to analyse the goals, priorities, and strategies of formal resilience plans created by member cities of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities programme. Our analysis reveals considerable variation in the extent to which cities focus on equity, implying that resilience may be more nuanced than some critics suggest. There are, however, clear areas for improvement. Dominant conceptions of equity are generally tied to a distributional orientation, with less focus on the recognitional and procedural dimensions. We hope our conceptual framework and lessons learned from this study can inform more just resilience planning and provide a foundation for future research on the equity implications of resilience. ARTICLE HISTORY

Frontiers in Sustainable Cities

Sustainability

Municipalities, their utilities and resource managers are designing and implementing policies and programs toward climate adaptation, which means governing urban water resources differently. Urban water managers are thus expanding their roles and responsibilities through the installation and maintenance of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) systems. This system expansion is perhaps more striking for water utilities administering GSI-related programs because they acquire a role that has an impact on how residents and neighborhoods will differentially experience the effects of climate change. Through an in-depth qualitative study of a GSI program in Tucson, Arizona, USA, we contribute to the socio-environmental justice framework with specific attention to distributive, procedural, recognition, interactional, and mobility justice. We highlight that a socio-environmental justice approach requires resource managers and decision-makers to recognize and respect the ways in which people’...

Environment and Urbanization 25:2, 2013

The impacts of climate change in any city are obviously influenced by the quality of its housing and other buildings, its infrastructure and services. These were not built with climate change risks in mind, although they were influenced by environmental health risks that were present when they were constructed (including those from extreme weather) and often by responses to past disasters. Well-governed cities that have greatly reduced these risks have accumulated resilience to the climate change impacts that exacerbate (or will exacerbate) these risks. In so doing, they have also developed the social, political, financial and institutional structures that provide the basis for addressing these and other risks. These structures were developed through social, environmental and political reforms, driven by such factors as democracy, decentralization and strong social movements representing the needs of those with limited incomes, or other factors associated with vulnerability. These “bottom-up” pressures from citizens and civil society on national and city governments are critical for developing the institutions and measures to reduce climate change-related risks (especially for those most at risk) and to support resilience.

… for Environment and …, 2007

This draft was prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation. The text draws heavily on a series of background papers that are acknowledged in the references; this paper and the accompanying Annex incorporates sections of text drawn directly from these papers and so parts of this ...

IIED Working Paper, 2008

This paper outlines a framework for adaptation to climate change for urban areas in low- and middle-income nations that is pro-poor and that enhances the capacity of low-income households and community organizations to contribute to such adaptation. It begins by describing how urban centres in low- and middle-income countries concentrate a large proportion of those most at risk from the effects of climate change – as people‘s lives, assets, environmental quality and future prosperity are threatened by the increasing risk of storms, flooding, landslides, heatwaves and drought that climate change is likely to bring. It also points to the weaknesses in the local institutions with responsibility for addressing this and the very large deficiencies in the infrastructure and services needed for protection. It also discusses the lack of attention given to supporting adaptation in urban areas by scientists, governments and international agencies, and considers why this is so.To improve understanding of the problems and to contribute to identifying solutions, the paper introduces an asset-based framework focused on households and community organizations. As a conceptual approach this helps to identify the asset vulnerability to climate change of low-income communities, households and individuals within urban areas. It also considers the role of assets in increasing adaptive capacity. The asset-based framework provides an operational tool, an asset-adaptation framework, which serves to highlight the measures needed to address four aspects of risk and vulnerability. These four aspects are illustrated in relation to extreme weather events. The first consists of the measures needed to protect those most at risk from extreme weather: safer sites, protective infrastructure and better-quality buildings – to prevent extreme weather events from causing disasters. The second, third and fourth aspects focus on limiting the impact of extremeweather events for low-income or otherwise vulnerable groups through household and community actions for pre-disaster damage limitation, immediate post-disaster response, and longer-term rebuilding. This highlights the many synergies between poverty reductionand resilience to climate change, and clarifies how vulnerability and risk are influenced by income level, age and gender.The paper then highlights three reasons why strengthening, protecting and adapting the assets and capabilities of individuals, households and communities is far more important in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries. The first is the limitations inurban governments’ adaptive capacity, especially in providing needed protective infrastructure and services to low-income populations. The second reason is the unwillingness of many city or municipal governments to work with low-income groups, especially those living in informal settlements (which usually include most of those most at risk from floods and storms). The third reason is the key role of assets in helping households and communities to cope with disasters. This focus on strengthening the asset base of households and communities is also a keymeans of building more competent, accountable local governments. The paper discusses how a substantial part of adaptive capacity relates to the ability of households and community organizations to make demands on local governments and, wherever possible, towork in partnership with them. Case studies illustrate the effectiveness of such partnerships in some nations. The paper concludes by discussing the roles for local and national governments and international agencies in supporting adaptive capacity at all levels.

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2011

Proceedings of IFoU 2018: Reframing Urban Resilience Implementation: Aligning Sustainability and Resilience, 2018

Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy

This commentary from the Journal Editorial Board sets out the research agenda for the journal and invites contributions. We want to elicit and synthesize research- and practice-based knowledge toward the goal of resilient, equitable cities in a world with less than 1.5°C of warming, focusing on the transformational change needed to achieve this goal. Within this focus, we set out two primary areas that are pivotal to demonstrate the economic and political strategies necessary to stop climate breakdown: ecologically and socially viable and just economic systems; and purposeful, progressive, and inclusive government and governance. We set out key principles of transformational change and invite a plurality of conceptualizations, particularly emphasizing the need and potential of drawing on emerging thinking at regional, national, and international levels and applying it to city-scale. We outline the need for action-oriented, policy-relevant research in collaboration with city actors, ...

Frontiers in Sociology