COP29 focused on making cities sustainable but overlooked concerns of a key group – the urban poor

When Mumbai-based climate advocate Dulari Parmar attended the COP29 climate conference in Baku in Azerbaijan last month, she was struck by the lack of conversation about urban poverty.

This was despite the fact that cities, which house more than half the world’s population, were in the spotlight at this year’s summit. That isn’t suprising, considering that a 2023 World Bank report found that urban areas generate 70% of global greenhouse emissions. Strategies to tackle them will be key to containing climate change/

However, Parmar said that the sessions she attended overlooked a key question: how to help the poorest residents of cities. “There are a lot of elite groups that are talking about climate action,” she said. “But it’s the poor and the youth from these communities who are actually impacted and do not have access to resources.”

At the conference, Parmar spoke about the Mitigation Work Programme, a process established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to aid countries in their efforts to tackle climate change.

The previous month, at another event, the United Nations had released a set of recommendations pertaining to this programme. But, Parmar noted, none of these addressed the specific needs of the urban poor. In fact, documentation from the event did not mention poverty at all, apart from a brief reference to a need for its eradication.

This is a serious lacuna, Parmar contended, given that impoverished urban communities are among the most impacted by climate change. Over one billion people worldwide live in informal urban settlements. These people are frequently exposed to extreme climate events such as heatwaves and flash flooding.

“The stake is live or die,” Parmar said.

She explained that across India, cities were seeing a high number of deaths from causes linked to climate change, such as heat and flooding. As a consequence, she said, it was crucial that governments and other bodies seeking to combat climate change foreground the urban poor.

Parmar attended the conference as a project associate for the not-for-profit organisation Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action, which focuses on the problem of urban poverty and began participating in COP events last year.

The organisation was part of a consortium of South Asian groups that put together a position letter with demands for global leaders at the conference. These included increased “climate financing commitments” from the global north “for the benefit of urban poor in South Asian countries” and the mandatory introduction of “early warning systems and risk assessment frameworks” to protect communities in cities.

“Climate change is impacting urban communities a lot,” said Aravind Unni, a Delhi-based urban rights activist and co-writer of the position letter. He noted that these communities might not use the term climate change, or other technical terms such as “loss and damage”. But, he added, “They are the ones who are seeing the brunt of it.”

Real world impacts

Shahenshah Ansari has first-hand experience of how climate change affects urban communities.

Growing up in Malad, a suburb of Mumbai, he witnessed an increase over the years in weather-related disasters in the region, such as flash floods and cyclones. Some families in his neighbourhood even lost their homes and livelihoods.

Poor infrastructure made the community more vulnerable to these disasters. “There are not enough stormwater drains or facilities there to remove excess water,” said Ansari, a member of Malvani Yuva Parishad, a collective of young people spearheading discussions about climate change, gender inequality and a lack of adequate housing in Malad.

He added, “Houses that didn’t used to go into flooding, now they also go into flooding.”

In addition, a forest in the area that Ansari grew up visiting became overrun with waste. Though waste dumping was illegal, Ansari never saw the local administration act against it.

Ansari did not attend COP29, but as he watched negotiations closely, he felt that the conference’s strictly global outlook and the complex jargon of its discussions obscured how urgent and real the problem was for people on the ground. Questions of infrastructure, housing and waste management barely featured in the conversations he came across.

At the same time, he explained, local leaders are typically unfamiliar with the concept of climate change and solutions to tackle it. “When we go to the local [municipal] corporators who are accessible to us, and we ask them about these things, they also don’t know what to do,” Ansari said. He noted that while some national and international bodies provide grants and other forms of support to local bodies, leaders he had spoken to were unaware of them.

The collective hopes to serve as a bridge between local problems and global resources and authorities. Getting a foot in the door is difficult, but Ansari is part of a growing number of Indian climate activists who are advocating for greater representation of local communities at climate conferences. “If we are not participating, how can we demand?” he asked. “How can we advocate for our rights?”

The housing question

Activists noted that housing is among the subjects that receive insufficient attention at climate conferences and other similar platforms.

This is despite the fact that the people most affected by climate disasters are those who lack adequate shelter. Homeless urban residents are particularly vulnerable to extreme temperatures and weather phenomena such as flooding.

But human rights lawyer Aishwarya Ayushmaan, who attended COP28 in Dubai last year, recounted that questions of homelessness and affordable housing received almost no mention at the conference.

“Even if they spoke about housing, it was only in the context of what type of air conditioning to use to reduce emissions, and these very high-level discussions which only pertained to a section of society,” said Ayushmaan, who is the programmes lead of the Housing and Land Rights Network, a Delhi-based housing rights organisation.

The organisation’s research has shown how pressing the problem is. One of its studies found that nearly 3 lakh people live in Delhi without shelter, including during the monsoon. Another found that 80% of Delhi’s homeless residents have experienced increased challenges due to heat over the past 10 years. Out of 102 homeless people surveyed, none said that they felt adequately protected from the heat.

The report notes that the extreme vulnerability of the homeless is underlined by the fact that, according to independent estimates, around 60% of “unidentified dead bodies” found by the police and other agencies in Delhi each year are of homeless individuals – in the past five years, the report states, “a majority of these deaths occurred during the summer months”.

Thus, for those Ayushmaan works with, climate change is not a matter of discomfort, but one of life and death. The desperation of their situation, however, is not usually reflected in bureaucratic global discussions, he observed.

“Both these realities exist in silos,” Ayushmaan said. “On one hand, you have all these high-level discussions, and on the other hand, you have people who are dealing day in and day out with the realities of climate change.”

Overcoming hurdles

Ruhie Kumar, a climate strategist based in Puducherry, noted that many activists and experts, and individuals who deal with climate stresses every day, struggle to access forums like international conferences because of bureaucratic hurdles.

To attend an edition of COP, an individual typically needs to be invited to participate at one of its events, for which they have to be part of a global network of experts and policymakers. They can also apply to be granted the status of observer, a process that can take more than a year. In many instances, individuals have to organise their own visas and cover their own expenses. These factors make the process far more daunting for those from communities of the global south than for those who live in the West.

Unsurprisingly, then, many such communities go unrepresented at the conferences, Kumar said. “There are speeches being made every year by Pacific Islanders talking about how their country and culture is going to disappear, and some of those speeches will go viral,” she said. “But unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of that from other Asian countries.”

Kumar said there’s a growing sense on the ground that the conference is not worth engaging with. Many feel that the conference just comprises “15 days of people screaming on a platform and then it’s all just back to whatever”.

But she noted that it would be ill-advised for these communities to cut themselves off from the conference completely. “There’s a lot of funders who look at what’s being said and what are the key words, and it starts to inform the funding and the narrative,” she said.

Indeed, she explained, navigating the language used in international forums was crucial for local communities seeking to access global funds and resources. She explained that people on the ground often struggle to understand terms like “fossil fuels” and “NDCs”, or nationally determined contributions.

“The global north creates the language and terminology for what you call this experience – whether it’s climate crisis, vulnerability or heat,” Kumar said. “I’ve heard it said very often that people don’t even know what climate change is. But I would love to ask them if they’ve ever gone to speak to people and just listened to their experience without judgement of what they’re calling it.”