Building climate resilience with vulnerable city dwellers with Sheela Patel and Philippa Nuttall

1 billion urban citizens live in informal settlements like slums and shanty towns, vulnerable to the most extreme impacts of climate change - flooding, prolonged drought and unprecedented heatwaves. India is in the eye of this storm — in May 2024, places in northern India, including Delhi, were suffering under temperatures as high as 50C, with those experiencing poverty most affected.

In this episode Philippa Nuttall is joined by Sheela Patel, activist, founding director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers and member of The Club of Rome to talk about the challenges faced by informal communities and the need for the experiences of these often excluded citizens, particularly women, to contribute to ensure effective climate initiatives and urban planning. 

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Full transcript:

Philippa: Welcome to the Club of Rome podcast exploring the shifts in mindset and policy needed to transform the complex challenges facing us today. I'm Philippa Nuttall, a freelance journalist and editor of Sustainable Views. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about climate resilience. I'm going to be speaking to Sheela Patel, the founder and director of The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, which is an NGO based in Mumbai in India that has been working since 1984 to support community organisations of the urban poor to secure housing and basic amenities. Sheela, thank you for being with us today. It's a great pleasure to speak to you.

Sheela: Me too.

Philippa: To kick us off. Perhaps you can explain to us what we mean by climate resilience and what's your interest in the subject?

Sheela: We believe that for any change to happen, behaviour, values, investments, knowledge, transitions have to happen in communities who are vulnerable, with all of us who are professionals who work with them. One of the flaws of the past development paradigm has been that we treat poor communities like charitable beneficiaries of whatever we throw at them, and we expect them to be very substantial and benevolently accept everything. And if it doesn't work for them, they don't take it. So we have worked very hard to produce strategies in which the transition produced by new knowledge for any change we believe has to happen across the board. So when we approached climate, which was not very long ago, just before the Paris Agreement, we were very uncomfortable with these silos that emerged in development and climate right from the UN, down. In the lives of poor people it's all meshed up and it's integrated. And therefore we believe that it's as important for communities to understand what is adaptation for changing your resilience, to dealing with unplanned episodes of climate, of extreme weather, that are now coming faster and faster at all of us, how they have to acknowledge themselves as first defenders whenever any crisis happens, and to take on that role seriously in making representation, in producing data, in producing evidence and demanding accountability from state and non state actors, while making their own contributions. So this is the way in which we work and we bring that same process into the climate space.

Philippa: Thanks. And sort of concretely, what have you been actually doing in the area of climate resilience with the urban poor to help them achieve the aims that you've just outlined?

Sheela: So a lot of our work has been to learn, as professionals working with communities, what is the climate science, theorisation and practical action, what does it mean in the lives of poor people? And what we explored together with community women was that extreme weather of wind, of high velocities, rain that came down in sheets, in ways and times that people didn't understand, and heat, which are the most common things that people experience when they live informally, was impacting every element of their lives. And in the conversation that we have with women, we started a campaign called What Women Want, which is to ask women leaders of very poor communities, not only in India, but through Slum Dwellers International's network of women leaders collectives in almost 17 countries, of what were the challenges that they were facing? And there were lots of challenges, but their priorities was their homes, which is symbolic by saying that their roofs were just unable to deal with extreme weather. The roofs flew away, they leaked, and they made their homes into ovens, and they didn't know what to do with it because that didn't happen 15 years ago. The second thing they said is that COVID demonstrated to them that food that was not grown nearby was completely inaccessible to them when there were curfews and where there were problems. So food, health. COVID brought out all the ways in which we don't look at the social determinants of health and the need for women to understand how climate was affecting both chronic and infectious diseases. So, health. The fourth one was transport. We all know in COVID, we were all stuck at home, but poor women had to go and work, and they had to find informal transport, which often ended up being as much as the wages that they earned. And so all these helped us look at the flaws in how our cities coped with crisis and how it impacted poor people. And the last one, which was traumatic. And interestingly, this was long before, you know, the climate change process understood the concept of losses and damages. They basically talked about how their lives are completely destroyed equally by physical demolitions of their homes, by their cities, and by climate episodes. There's no difference in our lives whether it's done by the city and bulldozers, whether it's done by a cyclone or something like that. So these kind of insights, the starkness of what was not designed to include them, like, for instance, all our cities all over the world, and definitely in the global south, are putting in a lot of investment in public transport to try and get more and more people out of cars into public transportation. Well, they're designed in a way that has nothing to do with informal settlements. So people have to use informal tuk tuks and bicycle rides and all those and walking to reach a public transport point. And as the public transport gets more and more sanitised to attract people like you and me. It got more and more expensive. So a lot of our work is now attempting to produce large groups of people all over the world, aggregating evidence to show what they needed and the starkness of what was not being done for them. And a very good example of that is the, is the campaign we started with the first of the five things called Roof Over Our Heads.

Philippa: Before we go into the campaign specifically, could you explain to us a little bit why you're working specifically with women rather than men?

Sheela: Several reasons. From the time we started this work 40 years ago, we realised that the challenges that we were picking up were not quick and easy wins. If you want tenure, you want basic amenities. We've often taken 15 or 20 years to get legislation. It's taken another ten years to actualise it in the form of investment that will produce evidence that such a thing is possible. All of us in our network, including the men we work with, say that men are, you know, men are very good at hundred metre dashes. You want something done quickly, you go to the guys, you want something that's going to take a long time, requires patience and perseverance and tenacity. You go to the women.

Philippa: And is also part of the reason for working with women, because they are particularly impacted, especially in some of these informal communities, in terms of having to, they're the ones that, I presume, put food on the table, who are responsible for the children, who could be impacted more if there is damage to the house, either through destruction, through the city being changed, or through climate impacts?

Sheela: Well, that's true, but I'm also very critical of campaigns, processes and projects that instrumentalise women. You know, everybody says, oh, you educate a woman and you educate the family, you give a loan to a woman and it invests. But nobody talks about that woman's emancipation, her ability to withstand pressure, to be subservient, who gives her voice and the right to make representation. So our work not only seeks to involve individualwomen, we create an aggregation of women's collectives, so that in all things where, you know, that's why you need social movements rather than projects. So we want to make this process such that it fulfils both aspects, that women learn to talk about themselves, they learn to represent themselves, they learn to negotiate. And the most powerful element that women bring through their advocacy is deep persistence.

Philippa: And could you perhaps use the project Roof Over Our Heads to give us some concrete examples of how what you mentioned as the theory is being put into practice?

Sheela: We're at a very early stage. What we are trying to do right now is to build a knowledge base to make an assessment of what is the resilience quotient index of their present homes. You know, it's like tomorrow, if you are living in Europe and your city has never faced real serious heat, then you've got to look at elements in your house that are not producing the ventilation, that are not producing the coolness, because your house was designed to hold in heat, not to give out heat. So you always have to make an assessment. Now, informal institutional arrangements, we have engineering companies and scientists who do that for us, so we just have to tick some boxes and we know what it is. But in the case of poor people, this doesn't exist because they build their own homes. It breaks, they upgrade it, they incrementally improve it. So what we are doing right now is that we are doing 17 settlements in ten cities in India where we are designing these processes with women's collectives, because our goal is that they should be able to identify every element of design, material and construction techniques of their own homes, so that they understand that from the perspective of resilience and its robustness to cope with these extreme weathers,and then work with professionals to change that, to make it resilient. But in the process develop a confidence that this is the right thing to do.And then they become the agents of further dissemination, first in their neighbourhoods and then in their cities. So the whole idea is that you start with making women confident of their own assessments, their abilities to make representation and then to negotiate. And then through this, a group of women and a group of professionals are now going to travel to different countries and different regions and train people like themselves there. The idea being that the most powerful form of learning, in our opinion, is peer learning. And we are very ambitious because we are saying we are going to talk to informal, like waste pickers and recyclers, from whom they get a lot of their material, to big cement, steel, tin roof, plastic, all the materials that are actually produced by big companies and networks of companies. To say, if 45% to 70% of people live informally, how can your commitment to hit net zero also embrace the social justice part of it? It's like we've got a big web of different things happening, but the excitement is that it's extremely decentralised. We produce the methodology, we share it, and then everybody who wants to deal with different elements of it participates and contributes. And our role is to kickstart about 100 labs in Asia, Africa, Mena, Latin America. We don't know so much of the Caribbean and we don't know much of the island cities and states, and we are putting everything into the public domain. We're not worried that somebody will steal the idea. We want everybody to steal the idea because we feel it's the best compliment anybody can take from you. No, it sounds super inspiring and very exciting. I was wondering if you're talking about informal communities, obviously you want these solutions to be permanent to a certain extent, that you're not putting in place something and then the community has to move on, or certain houses are destroyed because the government changes its plans.

Philippa: How do you plan to, or do you plan to work with local or national policymakers around these projects so that these become part of the sort of policymaking and they're not just seen as a system apart from the mainstream policymaking?

Sheela: You ask me my most favourite question.

Philippa: Excellent.

Sheela: The reality is that in Asia, where I have the statistics, I don't have it for Africa, 92% of all people who live informally, which is on an average, about 45% of cities design, construct and finance their own homes illegally. And if you calculate in the last 40 years that we've been doing this, the volume of research, investment, advocacy, subsidies, all these things put together, they haven't even reached 8% of the people who live informally. What we are learning today is that people coming into cities is a result of our global economic order of production and global efficiency models that are making rural livelihoods unviable. And that if families need to feed themselves, feed their children, keep a healthy life, have aspirations, they come into the city. The other crazy thing is that if you look at all our large metropolitan cities, they're becoming metropolitan regions, they're becoming ten times their size in the global south. So Mumbai, which the greater Mumbai is, say 12 million, it now covers in the metropolitan region ten times that size. So it's about 25 million people, and it's only 40% so far, which is urban, the rest is still rural. So what we're saying is that both the climate crisis and all these weather crises, and our economic, global economic order, which is very cash based, which is based on extraction, is going to push more and more people into the cities. So this traditional way of saying, can you give us tenure? Earlier, we could blame the colonists, because the colonists didn't want to give land to everybody, but now you are all democracies, but you are still not giving land for a right to live in the city. Although your constitution says you can move anywhere, earn anything, do anywhere. But planning doesn't give you land. So the only way poor people get access to land is to encroach. And at the moment, it's paradoxical, because they are encroaching on spaces that are very ecologically sensitive. So earlier we used to have fights with the so called environmentalists, as grassroots urban activists, saying, if you don't actually anticipate the people coming into the city and you don't provide them with spaces to stay, then they're going to be informal. They're going to be informal traders and agents and sellers. So most of our global and national advocacy is to say, this is the reality. You can continue with your old fashioned attempts to evict and demolish, but you are destroying the asset base of very, very poor people, and they aren't going anywhere. They are here to stay. So Roof Over Our Heads is not a permanent solution. And we are neither saying it is permanent nor attempting to make it permanent. We are trying to make it possible within the constraints in which people live, to make it more resilient. It's a very practical and simple way to say that you start with the most vulnerable and you walk through the challenges. So already I can tell you that two of the settlements that we were working with in India, in the state of Odisha, they have had to relocate. We did the assessment of their homes and then they have to be relocated and they chose to be relocated, and we're going to work with them in the new places to see how they can use existing and new materials to improve their homes.

Philippa: I was just going to say, in terms of that you've mentioned the challenge of relocation, but also in terms of the timelines, you said, for example, men are good at the 100 metre sprint, but women are better potentially over longer timeframes. Obviously, in terms of climate change, there's the long term change in terms of warming and the impacts, but there's also some very immediate challenges when there is a sudden storm or flash floods. And so how do you work with those kinds of different timeframes?

Sheela: I mean, are there sort of solutions you're looking at as very immediate solutions in terms of resilience, and then this longer term kind of change of logic as to how you approach these communities. The only choice we make is to work with the most vulnerable communities, and we do that because we believe that development never trickles down. So it's the exact opposite of this low hanging fruit business that a lot of us do in development, where you say that if you get early gains, then you'll get more money. But those solutions never work for the most poor. But the solutions that you develop for the poorest are more easily applicable and adaptable to better off, even within the range of the people living informally. So that is the only serious choice that we make. And we are going to follow all the lives of those people who have to relocate or who have to move and to understand how to make that transition as just as possible. Not pretending that we are God and we can just sort of take a wand and change everything, but that we, that they have a support structure that will walk them through their choices and their possibilities, but will also bring them to the attention globally. So right now we, we have a very committed network of women's collectives in Kenya, in Nairobi, who face these horrible floods that are going on right now. And because they lived by the rivers whose overflow they had, they got some money as compensation for the destruction, but the government is going to evict them from there. Now look at the irony of this process. So we are taking this globally. We are talking to mayors' organisations, we're talking to the climate change people working in disasters and saying we need to have a conversation that makes mayors aware that this is not a just action and we are supporting them in whatever they want to do. Our goal is to follow and not to, and never to pretend that we will have some beautiful, fabulous solution that you can take photographs of. It's not going to be like that. It's very humble, it's very simple. And it starts really where people are.

Philippa: A very different approach than we see in lots of the big sort of climate change international conferences. I wanted to bring us on to that. We obviously had COP 28 last year, where loss and damage was a big, important piece of a decision that needed to be made, how that was going to work, how the money was going to be distributed, where were the money was going to come from. You mentioned loss and damage before. We've got COP 29 coming up, which is supposedly going to be a climate conference around climate finance. Do you see a space within these big COPs for more of a humble approach, more of a community based approach like you've outlined, that can potentially make the most of, for example, loss and damage or climate finance initiatives? Or do you see your approach as being very separate to these big international meetings and sort of perhaps it can achieve more by not being in a way, perhaps contaminated by these big overriding messages.

Sheela: We don't look at anybody as adversarial. So we have a bunch of organisations that have a global presence, who see people like me and the work we do as local evidence to what they're doing globally, and we use them to bring out this, our messages and our ideas. And so in all the discussions where we could be with Sandrine, for instance, in the food security thing or in the other aspects of whatever, we had a contribution or an insight to make, we were there. We were there as much to see who else was there. What were they saying? How can we learn to relate to more communities and networks, as well as to support that process? Because we truly believe that the solution has to emerge that acknowledges that we are all living on this very vulnerable planet together. And all these wars and all this local and global adversarial behaviour is quite dysfunctional when you are facing this sort of planetary challenge. So that's the way we look at it. We don't look at it as, and we also learn to articulate our representation in the context of where these issues are very obviously absent. And that, for me, is very, very important, because many of the people who come to do research, they don't come with bad intentions. People who give money through philanthropy or through bilateral or multilateral assistance, it's not that they are bad, but they are stuck in a very old fashioned framework. You know, I call it the 19th century framework, very colonial, very northern driven. And all those, if you talk to people privately, they tell you that it's not worked, money has gone wasted, it's gone to the wrong places, it's not reached the right groups. Sometimes it doesn't even get disbursed because the rules are so ridiculous. Nobody wants to take any risks. Nobody wants to say they made mistakes. So these are all the things that we are learning how to reformulate, to say, if you don't take risks, you're not going to learn anything.

Philippa: Sandrine Dixson-Declève, the Co-president of The Club of Rome, she's been one of the voices who's called for a reform of the COPs. Do you think there needs to be a reform? So voices like yours and like climate resilience networks are heard more in these big international fora?

Sheela: Absolutely. I'm a signatory to the letter she wrote. So, yes, and I think that I don't, I don't see, I see these as very constructive, powerful messages that we are sending to say, we're not going to be old fashioned and walk away. We're going to insist that you change, because if you don't change, you're not fulfilling the obligations that your leadership requires. Could you explain a bit more your reasoning behind joining The Club of Rome and how it helps with the agenda that you're working on? Well, you know, it's strange that The Club of Rome celebrated 50 years. I have also worked for 50 years. It's my 50 years too, of work.

Philippa: Congratulations.

Sheela: So you see an organisation which has made these predictions for me, that's been very interesting, you know, this whole thing of planetary limits. So for me, I was, my, I looked initially as, when I saw people talking about The Club of Rome, I saw this as a very elite northern institution because that's a perception a lot of us feel. And then during COVID when there were web meetings and discussions, and I always made representations saying that it's not working for poor people. Your messages don't reflect what poor people need or that unless they become entrenched in the solution, it's not going to be realistic. I got invited to be a member and I'm a noisy person, so I make a lot of noise and I learned a great deal. I got a lot of support from many of the things that they do. I mean, our interest in food and agriculture, our interest in transport, our interest in disasters. There were things that The Club of Rome were doing that address some of these issues, had, you know, scientists and very well known climate champions that I got to meet, I got to talk. It's a privilege to be able to exchange views, to make representations. For me, the important thing is to produce engagement that brings people who don't generally talk to each other to be able to have conversations with ease, conversations that allow each other to challenge the other without it being adversarial. Because real ideas require these things.

Philippa: I think we're going to have to close it there, Sheela. But thanks very much for speaking to me. It was super interesting and really inspiring, the work you're doing. And good luck with the rest of your projects.

Sheela: Yeah, and if you go to Roof Over Our Heads, you'll see all our materials. You see all the people who are there talking differently about different aspects.

Philippa: Great. Thank you very much and good luck. And thanks for listening to The Club of Rome Podcast. And for more information, please visit clubofrome.org.