Adapting Cities to Climate Change: Understanding and Addressing the Development Challenges

Bicknell, Jane and Dodman, David and Satterthwaite, David (2009).
London: Earthscan Publications; 397 pages. ISBN 9781844077458.

The book Adapting Cities to Climate Change opens with an overview of risks that human settlements face due to climate change, potentials for adaptation, constraints on the implementation of necessary steps, and governments’ facilitating and protective roles. It then applies these topics to different parts of the world, with a focus on low- and middle-income regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America and case studies in Dhaka, Mombasa, Cotonou (Benin), Durban and Cape Town. These regions are home to most of the world’s children. For readers of Children, Youth and Environments, Sheridan Bartlett crystallizes the implications for young people in her chapter on “Climate Change and Urban Children: Impacts and Implications for Adaptation in Low-and Middle-Income Countries.”

Bartlett argues that children often face disproportionate risks from climate change. Young children in particular are vulnerable to deprivations, stress and exposure to disease agents—conditions that are intensified by the droughts, floods, rising temperatures and other extreme weather events associated with global warming. A large proportion of the world’s children live in poverty, which not only increases these risks, but weakens their families’ capacities to recover from adversity. Bartlett documents these impacts and draws implications and guidelines for local governments and development agencies. Of special usefulness are two tables. One identifies major predicted aspects of climate change (such as heat waves and heavy precipitation); anticipated impacts of each change on natural systems, human settlements and households; and implications for children. A second table identifies adaptations and responses that take children into account. For each of four dimensions of children’s lives (health, safety and nutrition; family and community coping strategies; daily activities and routines; children’s involvement in decision-making), the table lists steps that can reduce long-term risks, steps to prepare for extreme weather events, steps to respond to immediate losses and threats from extreme weather, and steps to adapt to losses and rebuild in ways that reduce future risks. Throughout the chapter, Bartlett emphasizes that children are not just passive victims of change but have strengths and capacities that need to be enlisted in decision-making and problem-solving.

The integration of Bartlett’s chapter into this volume of recent climate change predictions and suggested policy responses gives readers a wealth of context to draw upon as they think through the implications of climate change for young people in general, or young people in particular regions of the world. Readers can find a longer, more detailed development of Bartlett’s ideas in a discussion paper on Climate Change and Urban Children prepared for the International Institute for Environment and Development (August 2008). Additionally, a special issue of Children, Youth and Environments on “Children and Disasters” (volume 18, no. 1, 2008) contains an article on the topic of climate change by Bartlett as well as other articles that relate to children’s exposure to drought, hurricanes and other forms of extreme weather.

Louise Chawla