Cooling cities from the ground up
Active Project
Anna Walnycki
Cities lead
Telephone: +44 (0)20 3463 7399
Languages:
English,
Spanish and Welsh
Anna works with civil society, city governments and research partners to make climate action and climate finance work for people living in informal settlements across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Anna leads IIED’s work on cities, including the 'climate action for equitable cities' programme. Her work sits where informal settlement upgrading, climate finance and health meet – focused on how the urban poor can shape, and benefit from, the investments meant to protect them.
Anna has supported the practical and strategic work of urban civil society organisations and undertaken extensive participatory action research with long-term partners in sub Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Anna leads on the Wellcome-funded KISS (‘if cities could speak’) initiative – research across 21 sites in India, Kenya, Sierra Leone and South Africa with IIHS, IDS, KDI, SLURC and the African Centre for Cities. She also leads the 'cooling cities from the ground up' project on extreme heat in Mombasa’s informal settlements, with SDI Kenya and Cities Alliance, and IIED’s work in the Wellcome-funded pathogen urbanism consortium, with KDI, KWTRP and AAK.
Anna is IIED lead for the IKI-funded 'transformative urban coalitions' programme (with IDOS, UNU, WRI and partners in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil), which has run participatory climate action urban labs in León, Naucalpan, Recife, Teresina and Buenos Aires. Her urban climate finance research includes work with the African Cities Research Consortium on Accra, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Nairobi.
She works with civil society coalitions, research organisations and networks of cities to secure a concrete political commitment on climate finance for people-centred upgrading of informal settlements.
Expertise
Informal settlement upgrading, urban poverty and informality; urban climate finance and locally led climate action – adaptation and mitigation; climate adaptation, extreme heat and health in informal settlements; resilient water and sanitation; partnerships and co-production in poverty reduction and climate action; ethnographic and participatory action research
Before IIED
Education
- PhD development studies, STEPS Centre, Institute of Development Studies – doctoral research on the human right to water in peri-urban areas
- MSc environment and sustainable development, Development Planning Unit, UCL
- BSc anthropology, UCL
Current work
How marginalised urban communities, local governments and international agencies can co-produce equitable responses to climate change in cities and how climate finance can reach people-centred, in-situ upgrading of informal settlements, rather than bypass them.
Video playlist
Projects
