Climate action for equitable cities: working with informal communities for low-carbon, resilient futures
IIED is partnering with informal communities, researchers and policymakers to co-develop action research and policy strategies to strengthen urban climate resilience while addressing inequalities.

Villa 31 in Buenos Aires (Photo: Christoph Wesemann)
The global climate emergency disproportionately affects the 1.1 billion people living in low-income and informal urban settlements. While these communities have low emissions and have contributed least to climate change, they are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, rising sea levels, extreme heat and drought.
As cities continue to grow, urban policy and practice must enable low-carbon and resilient housing and basic services for informal settlements.
The scale of this challenge requires international agencies, researchers, governments, communities, businesses and donors to work together to foster innovation and forge new partnerships that respond to poverty, inequality and climate change.
IIED is working with partners, including informal communities, to co-produce and promote low-carbon, resilient futures.
The challenge
The climate crisis is happening now. Across the world, increased rainfall, rising sea levels and overheating are impacting cities, with severe consequences for the wellbeing of urban residents.
These risks will continue to grow, affecting more than 800 million people who live in low-lying coastal cities and the expanding numbers of urban areas with summertime temperatures of above 35 degrees.
With more people living in cities and informality as a common mode of urbanisation, new action research is needed to break patterns of growth that have led to vulnerability, inequality and high-carbon development pathways.
The funding available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in cities far outweighs adaptation priorities, representing over 90% of total urban climate finance.
Low-carbon development strategies that respond to urban infrastructure deficits and boost resilience can help plug the adaptation financing gaps, specifically in low-income areas. However, structural and practical factors obstruct the flow of resources to the local level and the delivery of context-relevant climate resilient development.
There are insufficient funds available to low- and middle-income countries, and very little of the money available targets populations most vulnerable to climate hazards.
And when funding does arrive it can be restrictive, unresponsive to local needs and filtered through many intermediaries. Local urban organisations are often deemed to be ‘risky’ and get stuck in a loop of capacity building rather than scaling up and replicating interventions.
By bringing together the knowledge and experience of settlement upgrading (which involves improving access to housing, basic services and tenure) and climate adaptation present in cities among government, donors or organised communities, we see an opportunity to integrate and reshape future actions to address climate risks.
Responses for transformation
Our focus on climate action for equitable cities draws on more than 50 years of experience supporting partnerships and dialogues across local, national and global levels to mobilise action that responds to poverty and inequality in cities.
IIED works with partners to co-produce action research at a local level, with city authorities and organised communities leading together to influence global climate actors and spaces. To advance these efforts, it is necessary to:
Strengthen the evidence and recognition of the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low-income, informal urban communities
The impacts of climate change fall heavily on informal and low-income settlements. Better understanding of the complexities of these impacts across basic services and infrastructure can enhance climate policy and action that responds to urban inequalities.
Enable decision makers to effectively govern and resource equitable climate action in low-income, informal urban communities
There are unequal opportunities for urban stakeholders, particularly from low-income and informal communities, to participate in climate policy, action and finance. Multi-stakeholder climate action, including financing, must prioritise urban equity and the inclusion of politically excluded groups.
Climate finance and governance mechanisms should be designed to engage low-income and marginalised social groups and to identity, support and scale up community-driven projects that reduce climate risks and deliver on local development priorities.
Document and support interventions that connect climate action (adaptation and mitigation) with efforts to tackle urban poverty, inequality and injustice at scale
Links between decarbonisation and social justice in cities are emerging, but there is a need for more empirical research and practical knowledge about grounding climate justice in low-income and informal settlements among grassroots organisations, planners and practitioners, policymakers and other governing actors.
Integrated climate action led by communities can boost city-wide resilience and reduce the risk of carbon lock-ins, while addressing structural and spatial urban inequalities.
Mobilising knowledge for impact
This area of work brings together urban researchers and long-term partners working on poverty, decarbonisation and resilience to produce an overarching framework for equitable and inclusive climate action in cities.
Our framing strengthens calls for more adaptation finance while recognising the false division between adaptation and mitigation action for many frontline partners.
This action and knowledge agenda is timely given the long-anticipated Special Report on Cities from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This special report, due in 2027, both underscores the imperative of urban climate action to halt global warming below the 1.5°C threshold and reduce climate risks to people and infrastructure.
As host to the IPCC chair and with an organisational mandate to connect research, action and policy, IIED will work closely with diverse stakeholders to ensure the Special Report on Cities includes state-of-the art research concerning climate change and informal settlements.
Importantly, we will work so policymakers, practitioners and civil society organisations have the appropriate tools and knowledge to act on the report’s findings and policy implications.
Building on our long history of working with Slum Dwellers International (SDI), we are collaborating to understand how locally-led climate action can simultaneously respond to structural poverty and inequalities.
Our aim is to co-produce action research in cities across sub-Saharan Africa to better understand how community-led processes and participatory urban governance can promote environmental resilience and low-carbon development in informal settlements. This will be enabled through knowledge exchanges between sub-Saharan federations of the urban poor and include local governments.
Using funding from The Wellcome Trust, we are collaborating with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Kounkuey Design Initiative, Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC) and the African Centre for Cities (ACC) to:
- Synthesise and contextualise the impacts of climate change on health in vulnerable urban settlements in India, Kenya, South Africa and Sierra Leone
- Co-produce compelling stories of health-related climate impacts and the actions that could address them in order to bring complex causal pathways to life, and
- Develop innovative approaches to communicating and achieving impact at multiple scales.
The International Climate Initiative and Transformative Urban Coalitions (IKI-TUC) currently supports the development of practical interventions focused on decarbonisation and inclusive, equitable climate governance in five Latin American cities.
In Buenos Aires, we are working with our sister organisation IIED-América Latina and local partners on an ongoing participatory upgrading intervention in Barrio 20 (a low-income informally developed settlement).
The team has established an urban lab that is currently exploring the use of green and blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions that respond to heat, and renewable and low-energy technologies that link resilience, decarbonisation and development.
Action agenda
- Climate-proof upgrading: settlement upgrading programmes and policies should integrate climate resilience development, including green-blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions that absorb carbon, improve air quality, mitigate extreme heat and flooding, and increase wellbeing of residents.
Planning codes and upgrading processes should enable and incentivise sustainable building practices and materials – especially low-cost solutions such as passive heating and cooling design, circular supply chains and traditional knowledges – and relevant energy-saving and renewable energy technology.
- Spend climate funding (mitigation and adaptation) in informal settlements: climate funding streams and policies such as climate action plans should prioritise informal settlements as legitimate sites of climate action.
Initiatives such as locally led adaptation, low-carbon development strategies, or zero-carbon cities can and should align with needs for housing, basic services and sustainable urban infrastructure to achieve climate targets and relevant sustainable development goals.
- Leverage participatory upgrading capacities for transformative climate action: community-based housing initiatives, re-urbanisation and settlement upgrading strategies, and finance architecture such as urban poor funds or city upgrading funds, can catalyse climate action from pilot to city-wide scale.
Grassroots networks such as SDI and transnational municipal networks can be key players for peer-to-peer exchange, capacity sharing and policy mobility.
Authors

Anna Walnycki is a principal researcher in IIED's climate action for equitable cities team. She works with civil society organisations and global partners to promote social justice and climate action in cities across the global South. Anna has over 10 years of experience co-producing action research on urban poverty and informality with long-term partners in sub–Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Tucker Landesman is a senior researcher in IIED's climate action for equitable cities team. He is a geographer with a multidisciplinary background and 10 years of experience researching and implementing projects on urban development, climate change and public health in Latin America as well as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. He focuses on innovative, inclusive urban policy and governance for more equitable and sustainable cities.