Pic: The Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants is improving living conditions and resilience to climate change in Senegal. World Habitat
An international online conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham, places a welcome spotlight on responding to extreme events that threaten housing and health worldwide. Its focus is on community-based solutions.
Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods are increasing in frequency and intensity. The United Nations estimates that 90 per cent of disasters are related to weather.
It's the job of academics to record such occurrence, so that we can learn from them. Sadly, they are easy to ignore. For two decades following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 their messages were fogged by denial and obfuscation. Now national exceptionalism is being used as a reason for inaction.
Increasingly, those working in the fields of construction, environmental sciences. international development, planning, public health, and energy, water and transport infrastructure are fighting back. It’s now recognised that strategies must work across multiple fields and that they are only sustainable if they are owned by the people affected most.
An international online conference in April, Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events has attracted speakers and interest from all over the world. Organised by the Healthier Housing Partnership and hosted by Birmingham University, it will include 32 speakers and case studies from 14 countries.
From Rio to Birmingham
The conference usefully re-frames ‘disasters’ as extreme events – predictable phenomena that we can plan for. It will draw lessons from events as diverse as ex-tropical Cyclone Ellie in Australia, the aftermath of an Indonesian earthquake, Spain’s worst flooding for decades and the needs of displaced populations in Nigeria.
Opening the conference will be Prof. David Hannah, UNESCO chair of water science and it will include speakers from Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia and DARAJA, providing early warning service Kenya and Tanzania.
One of the key messages of the conference will be that the extreme events that destroy houses and entire cities and displace millions of people do not fall into discreet categories. They frequently combine or are causally linked.
Melting ice in the world’s highest mountains should cause us as much concern as the shrinking polar ice caps. In Asia, it’s estimated that up to two billion people in eight countries are threatened by increasing glacial melt in the Himalayas. But that’s only part of the problem.
Nusrat Nasab, CEO of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) Pakistan will tell the conference that, in 2022, the combine effects of heavy monsoon rains and glacial runoff following a heat wave, led to Pakistan’s worst ever flooding, killing up 1,739 people. A third of the country was affected. She says: “I call Pakistan the ‘house of hazards. In the mountains, floods wash away everything. In the coastal areas it stays for months.”
Millions displaced
Dr Jamila Wakawa Zanna will explain that war, civil conflict and climate change often interact, in a deadly nexus. A UK-based academic at the University of Birmingham, she also works for Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA).
Globally it’s estimated that 72 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to extreme events. In Nigeria alone, up to four million people are internally displaced. In the north, it’s caused by conflict driven by religious extremism. In the south, it’s primarily flooding, ethnic clashes and land disputes.
Government camps are often over-crowded and unsafe. Even those run by international NGOs are often culturally insensitive, especially to the needs of women and the elderly, who are especially represented among internally displaced people.
Zanna comments: “External aid organisations don’t ask us what we need. They give us what they think we need.”
Eureka moments
In the poorest countries, people and assets are not generally insured. Consequently, the financial costs of an extreme event will be estimated as far lower than those of an equivalent in a wealthy country.
Health impacts and fatalities are hard to measure in countries lacking primary healthcare, epidemiological statistics and death certification. It’s common, in such parts of the world, for bodies buried beneath concrete rubble never to be recovered. Consequently, in the west, victims and consequences in low and middle income countries are often invisible.
We tend to ignore what happens a long way away. it’s all too easy to assign yet another extreme event to a dusty, seldom visited part of the brain – a third of Pakistan underwater, another earthquake somewhere in Asia, a savage, record-breaking cyclone devastating a Pacific paradise. A eureka moment, comes when we acknowledge that Gaia, our living, breathing planet, is out of whack and trying to throw us off, burn or drown us.
Such revelations are coming to more of us, more often. In the global north, we’re being lashed by storms and hurricanes, with anthropomorphic names with increasing frequency. The cities that we live in, or go on holiday to may be unbearably hot at certain times of year – or in some cases, subject to cyclones or surrounded by burning forests. The messages couldn’t be clearer.
Closer to home
This year, Californian cities were encroached by wildfires that seemed to have been designed by Evangelists concerned by the Biblical ‘end times’, with the help of Hollywood’s finest CGI technicians.
Rightly, the ‘disaster’ was well reported. Most people weren’t told, however, by the same news channels, that Chile, at other end of the continent had suffered the country’s worst ever wild fires in 2024 or that Canada’s national conflagration that year produced the global warming effect of a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions in India.
Closer to the UK, Paloma Taltavull de La Paz, a professor of applied economics at the University of Alicante, will tell the conference that, last year, torrential rain in East Spain brought over a year’s worth of precipitation in eight hours. Floods caused 232 deaths.
Planning and work to protect low-lying land around Turia Riiver in the Valencia region, begun following the deadly floods of 1957, had been abandoned long before the current generation of politicians took control. Flood victims have launched legal actions. They are calling for resignation of regional president Carlos Mazón for failing act promptly on meteorological warnings.
Local is best
Adaptive solutions can be simple, low-cost and low-tech. Those are the ones that will endure when the relief phase has ended and parachuted-in NGOs have left the scene.
They are also the most sympathetic with improving biodiversity and local capacity building. In Pakistan, the world’s most climate affected country, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat produces village disaster risk management plans. They involve talking to elders, who can remember which areas are prone to flooding.
Local solutions are being adopted that are being duplicated across Asia and Africa – for example, using large boulders to reinforce river banks and planting schemes that protect slopes from flash floods causing landslides and soil erosion. In 2020, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat Pakistan and the government of Gilgit-Baltistan in north-east of the country launched a $4.2 million project to plant 50 million trees across the region.
This great example of protecting human settlement from extreme events, and many more, will be showcased and discussed at the Building Resilience conference in April. Nusab says: “Empowered communities are more resilient. The west always looks to the government for help. Here, it’s more about the people themselves.”
Regiser for Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events
For more information contact Will Hatchett. E-mail wahatchett@gmail.com
“Climate change is the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced. These threats should unite us no matter from which part of the world we come.”
David Attenborough, speaking to the UN Security Council, 2021
“Professional fragmentation needs to be reduced if we are to better prepare for and respond to extreme events. The Building Resilience conference is a welcome contribution to that process.”
David Jacobs, Chief Scientist National Center for Healthy Housing
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