Jonathan Silver has co-edited a special issue of the journal Local Environment: ‘Urban vulnerability, adaptation and resilience: analysing the lessons from UN-Habitats CCCI’ including a paper on ‘Climate change, urban vulnerability and development in Saint-Louis and Bobo-Dioulasso: learning from across two West African cities’
The papers in this special issue bring together the research and policy communities to examine the insights which are emerging from UN-Habitat’s Cities and Climate Change Initiative (CCCI) and their implications for understanding and action on urban vulnerability, adaptation and resilience in response to climate change.
The papers have emerged through collaboration between the ESRC Urban Transitions and Climate Change project at Durham University (funded by ESRC) and UN-Habitat, as well as with colleagues at UCL and a number of municipalities involved in the CCCI process. They draw on the ongoing work undertaken by UN-Habitat since 2008 to support small and medium sized cities across the global South and the insights developed through the work of the Urban Transitions project concerning how, why and with what implications cities are responding to climate change. The focus of the special issue is on the three related issues of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience as they are emerging in the urban arena. While concerns for mitigation have long dominated the urban climate change agenda, the need to adjust to future climatic conditions and to respond to current climate related disasters is increasingly pushing questions of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience up the agenda. This collection provides rich empirical accounts of how this agenda is being developed in a diverse set of urban contexts in cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It provides insights into how climate change is being configured in a set of urban contexts which are rarely examined in the academic literature, and develops insights into how international agencies are seeking to respond to these issues. Furthermore, the papers illustrate the critical issues across the science/policy interface that are raised in co-producing the relevant knowledges concerning climate change dynamics that are required to develop such responses. The purpose of the special issue is to use these insights as a basis for opening up the debates and research agendas around the concepts of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience, and to identify critical issues for future research and policy attention.
You can access the articles here: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cloe20/current#.UfemlGRhk7Q
If you do not have access please get in touch with Jonathan Silver for copies (J.D.Silver@durham.ac.uk)