Building climate resilience with vulnerable city dwellers with Sheela Patel and Philippa Nuttall

1 billion urban citizens live in informal settlements like slums and shanty towns, vulnerable to the most extreme impacts of climate change - flooding, prolonged drought and unprecedented heatwaves. India is in the eye of this storm — in May 2024, places in northern India, including Delhi, were suffering under temperatures as high as 50C, with those experiencing poverty most affected.

In this episode Philippa Nuttall is joined by Sheela Patel, activist, founding director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers and member of The Club of Rome to talk about the challenges faced by informal communities and the need for the experiences of these often excluded citizens, particularly women, to contribute to ensure effective climate initiatives and urban planning. 

Watch the video:

Full transcript:

Philippa: Welcome to the Club of Rome podcast exploring the shifts in mindset and policy needed to transform the complex challenges facing us today. I'm Philippa Nuttall, a freelance journalist and editor of Sustainable Views. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about climate resilience. I'm going to be speaking to Sheela Patel, the founder and director of The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, which is an NGO based in Mumbai in India that has been working since 1984 to support community organisations of the urban poor to secure housing and basic amenities. Sheela, thank you for being with us today. It's a great pleasure to speak to you.

Sheela: Me too.

Philippa: To kick us off. Perhaps you can explain to us what we mean by climate resilience and what's your interest in the subject?

Sheela: We believe that for any change to happen, behaviour, values, investments, knowledge, transitions have to happen in communities who are vulnerable, with all of us who are professionals who work with them. One of the flaws of the past development paradigm has been that we treat poor communities like charitable beneficiaries of whatever we throw at them, and we expect them to be very substantial and benevolently accept everything. And if it doesn't work for them, they don't take it. So we have worked very hard to produce strategies in which the transition produced by new knowledge for any change we believe has to happen across the board. So when we approached climate, which was not very long ago, just before the Paris Agreement, we were very uncomfortable with these silos that emerged in development and climate right from the UN, down. In the lives of poor people it's all meshed up and it's integrated. And therefore we believe that it's as important for communities to understand what is adaptation for changing your resilience, to dealing with unplanned episodes of climate, of extreme weather, that are now coming faster and faster at all of us, how they have to acknowledge themselves as first defenders whenever any crisis happens, and to take on that role seriously in making representation, in producing data, in producing evidence and demanding accountability from state and non state actors, while making their own contributions. So this is the way in which we work and we bring that same process into the climate space.

Philippa: Thanks. And sort of concretely, what have you been actually doing in the area of climate resilience with the urban poor to help them achieve the aims that you've just outlined?

Sheela: So a lot of our work has been to learn, as professionals working with communities, what is the climate science, theorisation and practical action, what does it mean in the lives of poor people? And what we explored together with community women was that extreme weather of wind, of high velocities, rain that came down in sheets, in ways and times that people didn't understand, and heat, which are the most common things that people experience when they live informally, was impacting every element of their lives. And in the conversation t