Climate change and urban poor: Challenges & the road ahead

Climate change and the resulting natural phenomena have engulfed the whole globe. It is this realization of the growing concern that the world community has been actively participating in the deliberations to chart out the mitigation and adaptation strategies and plans to combat the dangers posed by the nature's fury. The Kyoto protocol (came into force in 2005), Copenhagen summit (2009), Cancun summit (2010) and the Durban summit (2011) are some of the instances of world efforts in recent times to come up with a global solution for the challenges being posed by the altering climate pattern. The changing world climate has the potential of affecting almost every section of the society and economy, yet as the studies reveal; much of the work in this regard has been done in context of rural livelihoods and agriculture. As such a very important facet of the climate change vulnerability has been relatively neglected. The urban slum dwellers due to their economic and social situation are the least resilient of the lot when it comes to adapting and avoiding the natural disasters. Such vulnerability puts the urban poor at the maximum risk especially when the global climatic conditions are on a change. The researchers need to deliberate on the possible explanations as to why urban poor have been unsuccessful and fared poorly as compared to rest of the strata of population in adapting to the climatic alterations. The present paper stresses on the identification of the causation variables that necessitate a concerted effort on the part of the central agencies and the local support groups to complement each other and to come up with a sustainable adaptation and mitigation mechanism that has urban poor as its prime focus. This will be the foremost step in building up of climate resilient cities.