Addressing and Financing Loss and Damage in Informal Urban Settlements

Loss and Damage (L&D) debates have paid too little attention to urban areas so far, despite serious negative impacts of climatic hazards on the lives and health of their dwellers (Singh et al. 2021). More than half of the world already lives in urban areas, and more than 1.1 billion people reside in informal settlements (UN Habitat 2023). In Sub-Saharan Africa, informal urban dwellers comprise more than half of the urban population, and the continuing urban growth has led to a disproportionate growth of informal settlements: in Asia by a factor of two, in Africa even by a factor of five (UN-Habitat 2022). Climate change is likely to increase this trend and further accelerate the emergence of new informal settlements. This is an additional reason why it is impossible to build sustainable, just, and safe cities without taking informal settlements into consideration.

People living in informal settlements are particularly affected by climatic hazards because underlying vulnerabilities – such as overcrowding, inadequate infrastructure, and lack of access to formal employment – amplify hazard impacts and exacerbate existing socio-economic and power disparities (Satterthwaite et al. 2020). The IPCC AR6 report has identified a higher urban adaptation gap for urban low-income groups; hence, their exposure to events like flooding, heatwaves, and water or food scarcity has much more disastrous impacts (Dodman et al. 2022). Consequently, the capacities of these dwellers to withstand and recover from climate-related disasters are undermined, although they barely have contributed to causing climate change.

Figure 1 shows how vulnerabilities of informal urban settlements link to L&D. Among the key challenges are the lack of tenure security, unsafe living conditions, and often being in the most hazard-prone areas of a city.

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