Projects

Urban poor children who lack appropriate safeguards and adequate care are highly vulnerable to increasing climate change impacts in the form of heat waves, sea-level rise, seasonal flooding and extreme weather events etc. Understanding their vulnerabilities and needs is important as it affects their right to life, survival and development.

With this backdrop, this project aimed at building resilience options and facilitating good urban governance mechanisms to address the climate change and disaster risk vulnerabilities of urban deprived children and marginalised population.

A participatory multi-stakeholder and bottom-up approach was adopted in all the four cities to understand the vulnerabilities of urban poor children and identify resilience actions/directions.

The process involved:

• - Multi-stakeholder participatory workshop
• - Shared learning dialogues with urban local bodies, parastatals, state government and CSOs etc.
• -Focused group discussions with children and community groups to further deliberate the identified vulnerabilities

Following are the key outcomes:

Based on inferences gathered from above interactions a “Climate Risk Frame” was evolved comprising of key Shocks and Stresses of the city which are impacting urban poor children the most. “Children Focused City Resilience Action Strategies and Directions” were formulated using the “Child-Centred Urban Climate Resilience Framework” which was evolved under this project.

The project has also supported the capacity building process of young urban planners of School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), New Delhi while integrating the agenda of UCCR and child-friendly cities in their Post-Graduate Studio Programme through the following initiatives:

• - Expert lectures for the Graduate and Post Graduate Students of Department of Environmental Planning were organized by GEAG at SPA, New Delhi
• -The Studio Programme students were facilitated in the Studio Cities of Vizianagaram, Sri Kakulam, and Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh.
• -GEAG provided handholding support through expert lectures and orientation of students to expose them to practical problems faced by cities in the context of disasters-climate change, focusing on children and the role of urban planning in addressing their vulnerabilities.