About

Our Focus

Cities in the Global South face pressing climate related health challenges. Our work argues that these challenges need emplacement, i.e. to be rooted not just in cities per se but particular neighbourhoods and communities that are at the forefront of climate and health risks. In these vulnerable settlements, as we call them, climate change adds an additional layer of vulnerability to already existing tenure insecurity, a fragile built environment, inadequate infrastructure and services, inequitable access to health systems and socio-economic exclusion.

Vulnerable settlements are on the frontline of climate change and are already experiencing associated health problems. Not only are the data on the impacts of climate on health in vulnerable settlements poorly understood, these settlements are also distanced from decision makers. Further, in many contexts, the narrative and response to climate hazards reproduces inequalities using the language of climate action when it does not equally centre other vulnerabilities that mark the settlement and people’s lives within it.

We seek to change this. Our work focuses on twenty one vulnerable settlements across nine cities and four countries in the Global South to tell stories from here that bring together climate change and health without losing the material, social, economic and spatial conditions of everyday life of majority of residents of the urban global South.

The Everyday Language

Gautam Bhan explains how people understand climate change and health through bodies, infrastructure, housing, memory and livelihoods.

Climate Health in the Global South

Project partners reflect on how communities across the Global South experience climate risk, health impacts and structural inequality.

Our Questions

We ask a set of key, interconnected questions across four work packages:

How can climate impacts on health be spatialised in the urban Global South? What does it mean to emplace them in particular cities and settlements?

How do people understand and articulate the relationships between climate change and health? How does living in an already vulnerable settlement shape these understandings?

How do residents of vulnerable settlements respond to climate impacts on their health?

How can storytelling and people’s narratives move the discussion of climate change health out from rooms of expertise and policy to become public discourse?

Our Approach

Research Approaches

Comparative research across the Global South

Comparative research approach across sites in the Global South - Delhi, Kalaburgi, Patna, Trivandrum, Freetown, Cape Town and Nairobi.

Focus on communication, storytelling, and building archives

The focus of the study is to enable pathways forward, which is why communication, narratives and building archives of emerging research is a clear work package from the onset of the study.

Spatial data meets grounded narratives

This study focuses on methods that both spatialise data across scale, and also unpack ground-up narratives of residents across time.

Connecting health and climate

Bridging Health and Climate research through the site of vulnerable settlements as a spatial site that connects these two themes.

We work across four countries, nine cities, and twenty one settlements, using four different work packages. Explore where we work here , how we work here, and who we are here.

Expected Outcomes

This work co-produces evidence and narratives with residents on how climate change is impacting their health to address gaps to:

(a) synthesise and contextualise the impacts of climate change on health in vulnerable urban settlements in India, Kenya, Sierra Leone and South Africa;

(b) co-produce compelling storylines of health-related climate impact and responses in order to bring causal pathways to life; and