ADAPTA-Mossoro: Collaborative Asset Planning for Urban Climate Change Adaptation in Mossoro, Brazil

According to the United Nations, over half of the world's population lives in urban areas, and projections indicate that by 2050, approximately 68% of the global population will be urbanised. Rapid urbanisation is perceived as increasing the vulnerability of urban centres to climate change impacts. It has, for instance, increased climate injustice through the concentration of people in low-lying coastal zones at risk from sea-level rise, severe weather events, and constraints on freshwater. In Brazil, where approximately 85% of the population lives in urban areas (IBGE, 2022), data from the National Confederation of Municipalities [Confederação Nacional de Municípios (CNM)] show that 93% of Brazilian cities were affected by climatic events from 2013 to 2022, and 4.2 million people had to leave their homes in 47% of Brazil's municipalities. Although Brazil is revising and implementing a new climate strategy, concrete actions to address urban climate uncertainties are sparse and limited (Barbi, 2016). This scenario gets even worse in Brazil's semi-arid northeast (SANEB), where climate change has increased the compounding and overlapping vulnerabilities of previously neglected and marginalised communities. Mossoró, SANEB's capital and a mid-sized city with approximately 264,577 residents (IBGE, 2022), is an excellent example of this, as it experiences intense sunlight, high temperatures, and a rainfall pattern characterised by scarcity, irregularity, and concentrated precipitation over three months. . This leads to frequent heatwaves and flash floods, which disproportionately affect the vulnerable population living in precarious housing and low-lying areas. To achieve Sustainable Development Goals (particularly SDG 11), creating inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities is urgently needed to support climate change mitigation and adaptation. Local governments and communities affected assume a central role in climate action planning. However, depending on the tools and strategies implemented, it risks exacerbating already deep social, economic, and political divisions in cities if it is not co-created, co-produced, and co-managed. To avoid climate vulnerabilities being tackled in a fragmented manner by conventional adaptation approaches, there is thus increasing urgency for researchers, planners, and policymakers to adopt participatory and intersectional frames that tackle these climate injustices while simultaneously striving to expand capacity to build transformative, sustainable futures. This proposal builds on emerging findings and collaborations established between Lancaster University (LU) and Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte (UERN) during the "Accumulation by segregation and dispossession project" funded by LU's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), while engaging policymakers and the public in climate change discussions in Mossoro, Brazil. The project adopts a transdisciplinary, pro-poor, and intersectional approach, utilising participatory appraisal methods, to explore how marginalised communities in the city of Mossoro understand and are impacted by climate injustice. The project will expand on a long-standing collaboration with a non-academic partner, Fridays for Future Mossoro, stakeholders, and an impacted community to co-produce knowledge and seek to inform policy at a time when Brazil's National Climate Plan 2024-2035 is being developed and cities across the country are gaining visibility. Brazil will also host the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 30) in November 2025. This event provides momentum for collaboration and the development of future projects arising from this pilot experience. Ultimately, the collaboration aims to benefit a historically neglected region within Brazil by addressing climate-related challenges and inspiring actions across the region and similar contexts globally.