Adapting to climate change

Adapting to climate change means adapting to risks from observed or expected changes. Governments, enterprises and households will all have to adapt.

In most urban centres, community organisations and local non-governmental organisations are also important, especially where they are influential in building homes and communities and providing services within informal or illegal settlements.

Successful adaptation is about the quality of local knowledge, local capacity and willingness to act. City governments should have key roles, not only in changing what they do, but also in the adaptation they encourage and support. This includes:

• ensuring the availability of an appropriate and widely understood information base about climate change and its local impacts – this does not exist in most cities
• land-use planning that avoids high-risk areas and shifts activities away from them, including ensuring that low-income groups can find affordable land for housing on safe sites
• revising building and infrastructure standards, in ways that do not impose unaffordable costs
• planning and public sector investment that considers climate change. For example, much infrastructure needs to be designed to cope with likely changes over 50 to 100 years.

Development should increase people's ability to act to reduce their vulnerability to climate change – due to improved local knowledge and increased income – and increase poorer groups' ability to influence local governments' action.

Insurance can spread risks and reduce the financial hardships linked to extreme events. It can also provide incentives for adaptation and risk reduction. But only a few poor urban households and enterprises can afford insurance.

For low-income groups, supporting the measures they already employ to reduce risk and vulnerability has more relevance – for instance, through community managed savings groups. In many countries, groups formed by people in 'slums' or informal settlements engage in risk management and risk reduction initiatives. These include upgrading slums and squatter settlements, developing new housing, and improving water supply, sanitation and drainage. In some cities, such groups have also developed detailed maps of informal settlements and collected data on who lives there to guide new infrastructure.

In Durban, South Africa, adaptation plans demonstrate the important role that local governments can and should play. Adaptation to climate change has to be built into the core of all urban planning and management. It is, however, difficult to get local governments to act on adaptation. There are always other priorities that seem more pressing and, at present, the information base on the likely local impacts of climate change is weak.

In most cities, planning for adaptation must first overcome an inadequate infrastructure base. Estimates of adaptation costs have yet to recognise this. Adaptation will need to address this deficit as well as making building improvements, strengthening of lifeline infrastructure and hazard modification (for instance repairing and strengthening flood, storm surge and coastal defences). All cities need effective disaster risk management plans, both to reduce risks and have in place appropriate responses. Good disaster-preparedness is a key part of adaptation.

However, adaptation means 'better coping', rather than removing risks. It does not remove or even reduce the urgency for mitigation: even for relatively low amounts of warming, there are natural and technical constraints to adaptation. Without strong and early mitigation, the difficulty and costs of adaptation will grow rapidly. While good development and adaptation to climate-change risks are complementary in important ways, most adaptation does entail opportunity costs.

David Satterthwaite
International Institute for Environment and Development, 3 Endsleigh Street, London, WC1H ODD, UK
david@iied.org