People living in the cities of sub-Saharan Africa rely on nature for water, fuel, food, inspiration, recreation and more. Nature also helps to regulate climate hazards, like droughts, floods and extreme heat, and buffer people from their impacts.
As nature is paved over, removed or fragmented, its benefits are degraded or lost. Because of how quickly cities are growing, their governance complexities. and the lasting effects of historical inequalities, city dwellers from informal settlements are most affected by nature’s degradation. These areas are also under-resourced, and the lived experiences of the people within them are not sufficiently considered in planning.
But by promoting the importance and use of nature, we can make our cities more sustainable, and more resilient to climate change. Figuring out how to do this in a way that is inclusive and appropriate for the local context, climate and biodiversity, means bringing together different people with different views, experiences and evidence.
The Tuwe Pamoja project intends to do just that by focusing on the three objectives listed below.
Understanding diverse lived experiences
We want to ensure that the needs, experiences and opinions of informal residents are well understood. In each city we are exploring ways to strengthen existing settlement profiling tools and participatory processes to effectively contribute to a contextualised understanding of three core themes:
NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS: If and how do people access and use nature and nature-based solutions?
CLIMATE RISK: How are people impacted by different climate-related risks?
INTERSECTIONALITY: How do individual traits (like age, sex, gender) intersect to affect these first two threads?
Examples from our work
Planning together for more resilient futures
As a second step, we want to strengthen the capacities of city actors to weigh up the pros, cons, costs and benefits of nature-based solutions by exploring the most suitable climate resilient development pathways. Climate resilient development pathways can be used to help communities, cities, and countries choose the most suitable interventions to adapt to climate change while meeting urgent development priorities. Until now, these pathways have mostly been used at city, country or regional levels.
We are exploring whether and how well this pathway approach can help city actors to plan nature-based solutions that holistically account for diverse needs and climate risks at the neighbourhood level
Examples from our work
Sharing learning within and across city contexts
Across the project we are focusing on multi-directional learning. Within each city we are focused on highly contextualised processes as we explore how to plan nature-based solutions in different and more beneficial ways. We are also interested in – and want to harness – commonalities and differences across the four cities, and working to identify processes and learnings that can be used in other contexts.
We share all of this learning through our local city networks, and through the broader networks of Slum Dwellers International and C40 to help strengthen local, community and government capacity elsewhere.
Examples from our research
CLARE is a flagship research programme on climate adaptation and resilience, funded mostly (about 90%) by UK Aid through the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) & co-funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.
