Resilience Thrift: Strategies for Adapting to Climatic Change in Housing for the Urban Poor

The consequences of climate change – droughts, rising temperatures, increased flood events, water crisis, depleted groundwater levels and many more – have affected millions of people in India. On top of this, urbanization increases disasters’ severity by adding population to cities whose infrastructure services are already limited. The urban poor, settling in the areas lacking infrastructure services, are the most vulnerable to climate induced disasters and events. Many of Ahmedabad’s low income settlements are at a high risk of flooding, facing shortages of freshwater supplies and other essential resources. Informal settlements are densely populated, poorly ventilated, and often made from corrugated metal and plastic sheets, which cannot defend against the vagaries of natural calamities or increasingly adverse heat conditions. The intersection of poor construction quality with settlement locations concentrated on sites of elevated exposure to climate disasters drastically increases risks to these populations.