Co-creating solutions for enhancing resilience in informal settlements
How do I strengthen early warning systems to minimise impacts?
What information do I need before I engage with an informal settlement to build climate resilience?
Effective climate resilience building in informal settlements starts with a strong understanding of local contexts, risks, and relationships. Before engagement begins, it is essential to understand the climate hazards affecting the settlement—such as flooding, heat, or storms—who and what is exposed, and why certain groups are more vulnerable. This includes mapping physical risks, such as topography, drainage, and housing conditions, alongside social dimensions including livelihoods, gender dynamics, tenure arrangements, mobility patterns, and access to services.
Equally important is understanding existing resilience-building initiatives, community structures, leadership arrangements, local organisations, and informal governance systems. This also involves examining how communities currently receive, interpret, and act on risk information, including any existing early warning systems. The INACCT Resilience Project has shown that documenting local knowledge, past climate events, coping strategies, and priorities identified by residents themselves is critical to designing interventions that are relevant, trusted, and effective.
Finally, understanding the wider institutional landscape (including the roles of local government departments, service providers, and NGOs) helps ensure that community-led resilience efforts can connect to broader urban systems. Taking the time to build this shared understanding supports co-produced solutions that are context-specific, inclusive, and more likely to be sustained over time.
Building climate resilience starts with understanding local risks, social dynamics, and governance contexts. INACCT demonstrates that grounding action in community knowledge and lived experience leads to more effective and inclusive resilience outcomes.
Durban’s CBFEWS
This document consolidates Durban’s existing CBFEWS experience in the Palmiet Catchment and shares reflections on what this experience means for upscaling CBFEWS in other locations
Flood early warning systems in Beira
This document shares the elements of flood early warning systems that exist in vulnerable informal settlements in Beira.
Piloting CBFEWS upscaling in Durban
This document shares the approach Durban adopted to test CBFEWS upscaling in additional settlements in Durban and documents the outcomes and learnings.
Learnings and recommendations for upscaling CBFEWS
This document consolidates the CBFEWS experiences to date across Durban and Beira, and provides practical guidelines and recommendations on how to upscale CBFEWS in other areas.
CLARE is a £110m, UK-Canada framework research programme on Climate Adaptation and Resilience, aiming to enable socially inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards. CLARE is an initiative jointly designed, funded and run by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and Canada’s International Development Research Centre. CLARE is primarily funded by UK aid from the UK government, along with the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
