Using Climate and Disaster Risk Information for Designing Pro-Poor Investments in Community Infrastructure Recording

The urban poor often lives where they can afford to such as in informal settlements, which are often non-compliant with planning and building regulations and lack community infrastructure for essential services. Factors such as rapid urbanization and limited land space continue to drive informal construction of housing in cities in high-risk areas. Precarious living conditions exacerbate their vulnerability to climate and disaster risks such as extreme heat, droughts, flooding, cyclones, storm surge, and sea-level rise.

Recurrent climate and disaster events disproportionately affect the urban poor who are also more exposed to increasing climate risk. Building the resilience of the urban poor requires not only mainstreaming climate change and disaster risk considerations in development policies and plans but also integrating these in designing and implementing programs and projects targeted at household, community, and city/local government levels.

Pro-poor housing and community infrastructure are key areas of interventions for building resilience, which need to be complemented by a range of interventions that include social protection, livelihood, health, and other measures at different scales. As part of the Resilience for the Urban Poor Forum 2021, two learning sessions will be conducted to promote the importance of the use of climate and disaster risk information for designing pro-poor resilience-building investments, particularly in the interrelated areas of housing and community infrastructure.

Learning Session 2 discussed the different kinds of climate and disaster risk information needed and how these can guide the design of community infrastructure. A simplified framework of a scenario planning process for using climate change and disaster risk information in designing community infrastructure for the urban poor will be introduced.