Active Climate, Earth & Environment Public Health & Healthcare

Spatialising Climate Impacts on Health: A Focus on Vulnerable Settlements in Megacities of the Global South

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation International Institute for Environment and Development
Funding £1.3M
Period Apr 2024 — Apr 2027

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

In informal settlements across four African and Asian nations, researchers are mapping the specific ways that heat, flooding, and drought sicken people who live in self-built housing, factory dormitories, and occupied buildings. Climate change does not affect all urban residents equally. A person living in a metal-roofed shack in Nairobi’s Kibera faces different health risks—heatstroke, waterborne disease, respiratory infections from dust—than someone in a brick apartment in Delhi. Yet most climate-health models treat cities as uniform surfaces, ignoring the spatial, material, and social conditions that determine who gets sick and how badly. This project fills that gap by grounding climate-health analysis in the actual physical and social fabric of vulnerable settlements. If successful, the research will produce detailed, location-specific accounts of how climate harms health in these communities, alongside practical adaptation strategies co-developed with residents. City planners, public health officials, and humanitarian agencies could use these findings to target interventions—such as improved drainage, shaded communal spaces, or heat-reflective roofing—to the settlements that need them most, rather than applying blanket policies that miss the most vulnerable.

View original technical description
Climate impacts on urban health need to be spatialised. This proposal focuses on vulnerable settlements that have specific spatial, material, ecological and socio-economic contexts that shape the extent of pre- and post-exposure vulnerabilities, the nature of the climate risk, the nature and severity of health outcomes, and the possibilities of adaptation. In this project we will: a) synthesise and contextualise the impacts of climate change on health in vulnerable urban settlements in India, Kenya, South Africa and Sierra Leone; b) co-produce compelling stories of health-related climate impacts and the actions which could address them in order to bring complex causal pathways to life; and c) develop innovative approaches to achieving impact at multiple scales. We are a trans-disciplinary team working with long-standing relationships with vulnerable settlements – informal settlements and workplaces, building occupations, and worker housing colonies. Through our presence in these sites, we have seen both the rising and differential experience of climate change as well as its impacts on health outcomes. It is through this engagement that we are also ideally placed to tell nuanced, multi-scalar, complex yet compelling and rooted stories about climate’s impact on health as well as to offer ways of engagement and response. "

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Anna Walnycki (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

"The Urban Futures project" Toward health equity, inclusive governance, and climate adaptation in African informal settlements
Transforming places for the precariously housed: Equitable adaptation pathways for climate mobilities
GCRF Accountability for Informal Urban Equity Hub
Co-developed Environmental Solutions to Mitigate the Impact of Temperature Extremes on the Health of Vulnerable Populations
Envisioning Environmental Equity: Climate Justice is Racial Justice

Original classification

Climate Impacts Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.