project description

Rapidly growing cities in Asia and Africa as well as the increasing vulnerability of many cities to rising sea levels, droughts, and natural disasters will be a major vector shaping regional and global security and prosperity over the next decades. How countries and societies will manage this period of change will affect the security, stability and development of many regions. In some regions these transformations will lead to abandoned cities as life within them becomes unsustainable; other regions will see increasingly crowded cities as a result of population growth or migration.

The scientific community is increasingly confident in these scenarios becoming a reality soon. The IPCC Working Group 1 has set out a clear physical science base (IPCC 2021) and the forthcoming assessment of the IPCC’s Working Group 2 on impact, adaptation and vulnerability (to be released in early 2022 but recently leaked, see Chade 2021) speaks plainly of the strains and limits of adaptation in the face of large-scale and systemic impact, social rupture and humanitarian crises. This expected turbulence has led other scientists to call on “experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and 'tell it like it is.' Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst” (Bredshaw et al. 2021).

Following this call to action, this project intends to draft a new policy framework that aims to help leaders in politics and civil society in cities to manage the coming era of climate change impact. Given the scale, it is well understood among experts that such a framework will require a fundamental rethink about how cities should address the multitude of challenges that they will need to grapple with simultaneously, and that will place inordinate demands on politicians, urban managers and citizens (Hoornweg and Pope 2017, 214, see also UN-Habitat 2020). There is therefore an urgent need to translate new thinking about how cities will develop into actionable responses to evermore complex challenges.

Within this context of rising complexity and unpredictability, this project proposes the notion of urban peace as a foundation for new peacebuilding leadership in cities that is at the nexus of environmental, climate, conflict resolution and peacebuilding fields. This agenda prioritizes the expansion of economic opportunities in informal economies as a critical strategic objective and operational entry point to manage the pressures in cities rpesulting from conflict or climate related migration or displacement, while at the same time helping to ensure peaceful urban politics in turbulent times.

publications 

Peaceworks No.191, September 2023: Pragmatic Peacebuilding for Climate Change Adaptation in Cities, by Achim Wennmann