more usefully focus on understanding how and when mobility can lead to poverty reduction and adaptation and when it can lead to increased vulnerability. Acting to support positive outcomes and reduce negative ones will then be a logical next step. This involves moving the focus to livelihoods—to income generating opportunities and their locations and to the living conditions and associated risks in places where such economic activities are concentrated. As mentioned earlier, an obvious adaptive response to climate change is to reduce the dependence of livelihoods on natural resources – for example, by expanding non-farm income activities. Income diversification that includes farming as well as non-farming activities and perhaps (but not necessarily) some form of mobility has long been shown to reduce vulnerability to shocks and stresses and to foster farming innovation (Bah et al., 2003; Hoang et al., 2008; Tiffen, 2003). All of these are relevant in the context of climate change. A focus on living conditions brings to the fore the need to locate urban poverty in its context of socioeconomic, cultural, political and environmental transformations. From this perspective, urban poverty is as diverse as the characteristics of each urban centre— e.g., its size, economic base, rate of growth and migration patterns, administrative and political setup and ecological and geographic characteristics.
Urban Location and Climate-related Hazards One of the dangers of urbanizing in a changing climate is that the receiving urban centres may be in locations that are or will be susceptible to climate-related hazards. The location and size of urban centres are path-dependent (Arthur, 1988; Martin and Sunley, 2006). Small differences in infrastructure investment or public policy in the present can, in some cases, result in large differences in the future spatial and size distribution of cities. Urban development is to some degree locked in by the interdependence of locational decisions: Industrial enterprises, services and the residents themselves locate where they do largely because of the other people and enterprises located nearby. Shifting established urban spatial patterns can be costly as well as socially disruptive. But current policies are also establishing the cities of tomorrow under the influence of climate conditions set to change. As such, an obvious adaptive strategy might be to steer new urban development away from locations likely to be prone to future climate hazards. This could be especially important in Africa and Asia, where urban populations are growing rapidly as the result of both urbanization and natural population growth. Unfortunately, it is difficult to predict where and how severe climate-related hazards are apt to occur and difficult to change settlement patterns on the basis of predicted hazards. Moreover, attempts to shift populations away from climate-vulnerable locations could easily be hijacked by less noble-minded attempts to exclude “undesirable” residents. This section focuses on low-elevation coastal cities and water-scarce cities, particularly in Africa and Asia. In both cases, the analysis starts with an overview of the character of the physical burdens and the size of the potentially exposed urban populations and ends by examining how land-based exclusionary practices, potentially aggravated by climate change policies, could create special problems for disadvantaged groups. 28
The De mogra ph y of Ada ptation to C l imate Ch ange
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