By Ariana Karamallis
Most people live in cities and the world’s urban population is projected to increase by another 2.5 billion people by 2050.
Nearly half of urban residents – roughly a billion people – are living in slums and informal settlements.
These communities, despite contributing the least to climate change, are, in fact, the most severely affected.
The impacts of climate change are becoming more severe daily, with disasters such as strong winds, heavy rains, and floods leaving 14 million people homeless every year.
Last year, 240 climate-related disasters were reported globally.
Africa’s housing deficit is severe, with an urban slum population of roughly 200 million and between 60% to 90% of the population living in unsafe, overcrowded housing without access to basic services.
Inadequate housing is disproportionately inhabited by the poor and vulnerable, with climate change impacts exacerbating housing inadequacies in informal settlements.
We can expect the numbers to rise as urban populations swell and climate change impacts worsen – unless we take action now to make informal settlements more resilient.
With more than half the 40 countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis and 23 of the world’s 28 poorest countries in Africa, the continent’s poor communities face extreme vulnerability to climate change.
South Africa’s qualitative housing shortage is sitting at approximately 3.7 million and is estimated to be growing by about 178 000 annually.
While state-subsidised programmes have existed for decades, they are unable to keep up with demand.
Increasingly, housing experts and activists are exploring the potential of state-provided financial and technical support for self-built housing construction as a way forward to close the housing gap.
According to South Africa’s Department of Human Settlements, there are about 4 300 informal settlements, home to anywhere between two to five million people, or more.
Incremental informal settlement upgrading
For Africa’s urban poor, resident-driven incremental home upgrading is the best option to improve (or rebuild) inadequate homes. Incremental upgrading is the go-to solution for most of the continent’s urban poor communities.
But the communities lack the financial, technical or policy support needed to do this work in a way that addresses resilience to climate change impacts and disasters, such as windstorms, floods and extreme heat.
Instead, they are forced to pay a premium for sub-standard construction materials and are unable to access the financial resources or technical support needed to make their homes resilient to extreme weather, causing them to spend money repeatedly rebuilding their homes after increasingly frequent storms, fires and other disasters.
For more than a decade, slum upgrading has proved to be “the most financially and socially appropriate approach to addressing the challenge of existing slums”.
In recent years, it has become clear that upgrading informal dwellings incrementally and in situ is not only more affordable for residents and governments and better for the social fabric of a community, but is also better for the environment – reducing carbon emissions through operational and embodied carbon reduction resulting from reuse of materials and densification.
This is no different in South Africa, where the sprawling informal settlements present challenges related to infrastructure provision, transport and land.
For these reasons and more, a sustainable resilient housing approach in South Africa must be one that is based around incremental, in situ upgrading of informal settlements, capitalising on and building residents’ assets, as well as social, political and financial capital, while mitigating negative climate change impacts.
By incrementally upgrading informally built housing, it is possible to create homes that are safe and resilient to climate impacts and disasters.
The Climate-Resilient Housing Initiative, powered by Build Change, is working hard to bring about systems change for climate-resilient housing.
It has brought together governments, researchers and practitioners to advocate for a systems change approach to increase access to resilient housing by addressing policy, finance and technical barriers that stand in the way of providing resilient sustainable home upgrading and construction that is safe, accessible, affordable and attractive to urban poor residents.
While there are certainly technical solutions and innovations to make informal homes climate resilient, the most impactful way to address the issue at scale is through addressing barriers to resilient housing related to people and policy, finance and technology.
What is climate-resilient housing?
Climate-resilient housing (CRH) refers to homes that are designed and constructed to withstand and adapt to the hazards posed by climate change.
The homes are built with materials and techniques that prioritise occupant safety, minimise environmental impact, enhance energy efficiency and are capable of withstanding extreme weather events such as hurricanes.
CRH is also accessible and affordable, providing vulnerable communities with safe and stable housing options, incorporating designs and policies that prioritise the health and comfort of residents, particularly in the face of increasing climate variability and extreme weather.
What it takes
There must be a demand for resilient housing, and governments must take the lead in providing an enabling environment for resilient housing to be realised.
This means effective housing policies and programmes that are relevant and operational in complex informal housing contexts.
We also need innovative finance mechanisms that are accessible and affordable for the urban poor – whether this means adjustments to subsidy programmes to enable incremental upgrading for resilience, or the development and provision of incremental finance products from private institutions.
Affordable, accessible home financing that caters to urban poor populations living in informal housing is a key ingredient to enabling climate-resilient housing at scale.
Lastly, technological advances – such as digital platforms that mainstream subject matter expertise – can enable governments, finance institutions, and other housing providers to take resilient housing programmes to scale.
Building local capacity at all stages of the housing value chain is essential to realise these changes.
In South Africa, we can go a long way towards achieving this by working with urban poor communities and the organisations that support them to ensure that the needs, priorities and realities of informal settlement residents are included in policy making.
We can also continue to provide technical support to residents and the burgeoning industry of micro-developers in informal settlements to equip them with information about climate-related risks and the interventions they can make to improve their homes and communities.
As civil society and government moves forward with a new White Paper on Human Settlements, it will be critical to ensure that policies and the implementation work that follows centre community-driven approaches to incremental slum upgrading that prioritise climate and disaster resilience. This must include capacity building, skills training, and livelihood creation.
Civil society has – and must continue – joining forces to bring the needed skills and interventions to informal communities to ensure their resilience against the increasing risks they are facing.
Effective resilient housing programmes must be homeowner-driven, placing the needs and priorities of residents at the centre of the process, and must focus on building the capacities of the homeowners and communities, thereby increasing capacities and creating jobs.
By building the capacity of men, women and youth to be builders, block-makers, welders and construction workers we can address the housing deficit while reducing unemployment, supporting entrepreneurship, impacting local value chains and making safe building materials available in the long term.
With housing being the agglomeration of various markets, this is critical. We cannot solve the housing crisis without addressing unemployment and the need for skills, capacities and jobs at the same time.
While urban poverty, the global housing deficit and the climate crisis are each immensely complex, systemic challenges to address, significant progress can be made to improve the lives of billions by making housing more resilient using methods and materials that are locally appropriate, affordable, adaptable and resilient.
To do this, we must continue to engage governments, policymakers and financial institutions to implement homeowner-driven resilient housing retrofit programmes, addressing barriers related to policy, money and technology that stand in the way of making resilient housing accessible to all.
* Ariana Karamallis is a Global Advocacy & Development Manager for Build Change. ariana@buildchange.org
* This article appeared in the Weekend Argus and the Saturday Star