Adriana Allen

Managing the health effects of climate change

Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Effects of climate change on health will affect most populations in the next decades and put the lives and wellbeing of billions of people at increased risk. During this century, earthﾒs average surface temperature rises are likely to exceed the safe threshold of 2ﾰC above preindustrial average temperature. Rises will be greater at higher latitudes, with medium-risk scenarios predicting 2ﾖ3ﾰC rises by 2090 and 4ﾖ5ﾰC rises in northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia. In this report, we have outlined the major threatsﾗboth direct and indirectﾗto global health from climate change through changing patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, vulnerable shelter and human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population growth and migration. Although vector-borne diseases will expand their reach and death tolls, especially among elderly people, will increase because of heatwaves, the indirect effects of climate change on water, food security, and extreme climatic events are likely to have the biggest effect on global health.

Environmental planning and management of the peri-urban interface: perspectives on an emerging field

Although there is no consensus on the definition of the peri-urban interface, there is growing recognition among development professionals and institutions that rural and urban features tend increasingly to co-exist within cities and beyond their limits. There is also recognition that the urban–rural dichotomy that is deeply ingrained in planning systems is inadequate for dealing with processes of environmental and developmental change in the peri-urban context. This paper argues that environmental planning and management of the peri-urban interface cannot simply be based on the extrapolation of planning approaches and tools applied in rural and urban areas. Instead, it needs to be based on the construction of an approach that responds to the specific environment, social, economic and institutional aspects of the peri-urban interface. The paper also outlines approaches to environmental planning and management in the peri-urban interface, examining its specificity in terms of both the challenges faced and possible approaches for implementation.

The peri-urban water poor: citizens or consumers?

Using the results of a comparative three-year research project in five metropolitan areas, this article reviews a range of practices in accessing water and sanitation by peri-urban poor residents and producers. It starts from the observation that neither centralized supply policies nor the market through, for example, large-scale profit-making enterprises are able to meet their needs. Although they are consumers insofar as they have no option but to pay market prices for water (and often for sanitation), the peri-urban poor are, in practice, sometimes regarded as citizens with basic entitlements such as the right to water. This article outlines a conceptual distinction between “policy-driven” and “needs-driven” practices in the access to peri-urban water and sanitation services. The case studies show that this access is mainly needs-driven and informal rather than the result of formal policies. The key to structural improvements in water and sanitation lies in the recognition of these practices and their articulation to the formal system under new governance regimes.

Built-in resilience: learning from grassroots coping strategies for climate variability

Significant lessons can be drawn from grassroots experiences of coping with extreme weather for reducing the vulnerability of the urban poor to climate change. This paper examines the household and community coping strategies used by low-income households living in Korail, the largest informal settlement in Dhaka. This includes how they use physical, economic and social means to reduce risk, reduce losses and facilitate recovery from flooding and high temperatures, and shows how grassroots adaptation differs according to the level of risk from flooding. The paper also discusses how local planning and governance mechanisms aimed at adaptation can support these coping strategies, including mainstreaming them into adaptation plans that can be scaled up to the citywide level.

Neither Rural nor Urban: Service Delivery Options That Work for the Peri-urban Poor

This chapter examines why it is necessary and relevant to overcome the rural–urban divide in order to obtain a better grasp of the water and sanitation (WATSAN) needs of the peri-urban poor. While explicit concern with the nature and impact of rural–urban linkages on people’s livelihoods and quality of life is relatively recent, assumptions about the role of urban and rural areas and their relationship are implicit in almost all development theories. Aimed at taking the reader beyond the rural–urban dichotomy and public–private controversy, the discussion explores the multiple practices and arrangements by which the peri-urban poor actually access water and sanitation on the ground. The concept of ‘service co-production’ is presented in this context as a means to explore meaningful institutional mechanisms to support their multiple practices and arrangements and their role and rights as key agents of change. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the previously discussed conceptual developments and empirical evidence can aid the identification of service delivery options that work for the peri-urban poor.

Water trajectories through non-networked infrastructure: insights from peri-urban Dar es Salaam, Cochabamba and Kolkata

For many urbanites, infrastructural uncertainty refers to ‘predictable shocks’ rather than constituting a quotidian experience. By contrast, for the peri-urban poor, the sources of uncertainty underpinning water and sanitation services are endless: uncertainty about cost, about being evicted and indeed about ever becoming connected to networked systems. Drawing on a number of case studies, we argue that across the urban global south, the future is not one of networked systems but rather one of ‘infrastructural archipelagos’ that need to be thoroughly understood in order to bridge the growing gap between everyday and large infrastructural planning practices.

Glass half empty? Urban water poverty halfway through the Decade of Water for Life

The moral imperative of tackling urban water poverty should not require much elaboration. Access to clean water is a basic right denied to millions of people living in cities across the world. Being outside the formal systems of water provision through centralised pipe networks, the poorest often pay the highest price for water. Water from vendors and bottled water are notoriously expensive compared with piped water. Illegal water connections managed by organised gangs can also come at a high cost to people living in slums. The cost of fuel to boil unsafe water can also be significant, further increasing the economic burden of water provision on those who can least afford it. Urbanities are often characterised as the beneficiaries of increased wealth and opportunities generated in cities but for many urban life can also constitute a trap of poverty and insecurity. Water plays a crucial role in making a difference between these two scenarios. In 2000 the United Nations (UN) included targets to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe water and sanitation in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and in 2005 it launched the Decade of Water for Life. We are now more than halfway through the decade and only 4 years away from the 2015 deadline set by the UN MDGs, prompting reflection on progress and obstacles to delivering reliable, safe water to people in cities everywhere. Urban water poverty raises questions not only in relation to how to meet the water needs of urban dwellers but also on how to protect and enforce their rights to the city. This special issue on ‘Urban Water Poverty’ addresses the challenges of providing universal and sustainable access to clean water in cities. Lack of access to water in cities is rarely a result of an absolute scarcity of water. Most cities have access to sufficient water resources to meet the basic needs of all residents, but in rapidly growing cities infrastructure provision has not kept up with the pace of settlement, leaving the poorest people without reliable and affordable access to safe, clean water. For this reason, it is important to consider urban water poverty as distinct from water scarcity and to draw attention to the need for political, social, economic and institutional change to improve urban water provision.

Environmental justice and urban resilience in the global south

© The Editor(s) and The Author(s) 2017. This edited volume provides a fresh perspective on the important yet often neglected relationship between environmental justice and urban resilience. Many scholars have argued that resilient cities are more just cities. But what if the process of increasing the resilience of the city as a whole happens at the expense of the rights of certain groups? If urban resilience focuses on the degree to which cities are able to reorganise in creative ways and adapt to shocks, do pervasive inequalities in access to environmental services have an effect on this ability? This book brings together an interdisciplinary and intergeneration group of scholars to examine the contradictions and tensions that develop as they play out in cities of the Global South through a series of empirically grounded case studies spanning cities of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Relational Trajectories of Urban Water Poverty in Lima and Dar es Salaam

Women’s trajectories in and out of urban water poverty are located at varying intersections of class, citizenship, age, ethnicity and other social categories and identities. Previous work by feminist researchers has demonstrated how women’s experiences and their possibilities in life differ depending on these intersections. This chapter examines how three women and one man in two informal settlements in Lima (Peru) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) experience water poverty in their daily lives and seek water justice. Drawing on primary research, the chapter adopts a portraiture approach to weave an intricate outline of how these four people navigate fuzzy water entitlements in these two cities. The discussion shows how gender cannot be understood in isolation. As a practice it intersects with issues of urban life to create gendered trajectories that explain why and how some women can escape water poverty and activate their right to water while others cannot. In doing so, we adopt a dialectical perspective to explore how an intersectional approach can go beyond enduring individualist and reductionist assumptions linked to Western liberal underpinnings embedded in water interventions. The discussion posits the need to include a robust conception of the social world in which change depends on shifting power relations, and individual agency is shaped by power or social forces as well as individual will.

The co-production of water justice in Latin American cities

The concept of co-production implies that ‘citizens can play an active role in producing public goods and services of consequence to them’ by building upon existing local institutions and thereby reducing the scope for misappropriation of resources (Ostrom in World Development 24:1073–1087, 1996; Baland and Platteau in Halting degradation of natural resources: Is there arole for rural communities. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000). Based on arguments for a minimalist state, the political mood of the 1980s and 1990s provided commons scholars with an opportunity to emphasize institutional arrangements involving partnerships between state and civil society. Further, given the primacy of arguments that drove reductions in staff and agency budgets, a space was opened up for practical and scholarly exploration of incentives for enhanced accountability of public sector decision-making. In Latin America, of late, platforms for co-production have flourished in diverse socio-political conditions, with examples emerging from the public, private and community-led initiatives, mushrooming in particular under conditions of deepened infrastructural inequality. This chapter addresses an acknowledged weakness in this field by examining the role of co-production platforms, not only in addressing citizens’ practical water needs but also its scope for enhancing the transformative capacity of those involved. Drawing on peri-urban case studies in Bolivia (Cochabamba) and Venezuela (Caracas)—both of which moving into distinctive ‘post-neoliberal’ phases—the chapter explores the degree to which institutionalized service co-production mechanisms can build water justice. In doing so, the discussion considers the resilience of co-production platforms not only to withstand traditionally pervasive practices of political clientelism but also to lead to wider socio-political transformations and their scope to reconfigure unequal power-relations and overarching inequalities in the political economy of regulating water (in)justice.