Loss and Damage in Informal Urban Settlements: How Digital Solutions Can Support Pathways Towards More Climate Justice
Digital tools expose where climate loss and damage hits hardest in informal settlements — a shift highlighted by Jacqueline Wingens through Nairobi’s Pamoja Trust.
We live in an increasingly urban world. Today, around 1.1 billion people live in informal settlements, that is, every third urban resident in the Global South. While the number of people living in informal settlements increases, the climate crisis continues to progress, pushing the topic of loss and damage in informal urban settlements to the centre stage. Even in a 1.5°C temperature increase scenario, losses and damages will become harder to avoid. The aim of building sustainable cities must therefore centre on people in informal settlements. They are an essential part of urban societies, systems, and economies, as well as disaster risk mitigation.
Urbanisation, Informality and Loss and Damage
Climate-related natural disasters occur more frequently and are becoming increasingly devastating. They hit hardest the people who contributed the least to the climate crisis, both globally and locally. People living in informal settlements are amongst the most vulnerable. Their homes are often located in high-risk or hazard-prone areas, near oceans, on slopes or along riverbeds. Access to public infrastructure and services is usually very limited. This worsens already challenging economic conditions. These locations make people in informal settlements particularly vulnerable to external shocks, both sudden disasters such as floods and storms, as well as slow-onset changes like rising temperature or sea level rise. As a result, losses and damages become far more likely. Loss and damage are defined as impacts from climate-related stressors that cannot be prevented by mitigation or adaptation.
Residents of informal settlements often lack recognition by public authorities or formal tenure security. They are often neither part of city maps nor urban planning. When extreme weather events occur, they are more likely to be excluded from state-led post-disaster measures, social protection, governmental benefits and financial support. People in informal settlements can often only rely on their communities. They are largely being left alone with occurred losses and damages and the need to build back.
The state is often absent in disaster prevention or management in informal settlements. Yet, environmental or climate risks are increasingly used for these communities as justification for government-led forced evictions or relocations. In many cases, people are forcefully displaced, often far away from their workplaces and communities. Due to their informal status, affected communities have little protection from arbitrary state action. In some contexts, they are rather criminalised with arguments around ‘illegal’ land occupation instead of a rights-based approach for the human right to adequate housing.
Digitalisation as a Gateway Towards More Climate Justice for Informal Settlers
In this situation, it is crucial to make losses and damages visible and to strengthen the position of residents in informal settlements. Digital tools and community-led data can support climate justice by showing who is affected, how they are affected, and where support is missing. Civil society actors can play a key role in this. By generating better data, they can improve how we understand, prevent and respond to losses and damages in these settlements. For instance, when heavy rains begin, solid waste mixes with floodwater, which increases disease risks. Rivers overflow, and drainage canals are overwhelmed. When heavy rains follow after a drought – often paired with the urban heat island effects – the dry soil cannot take in all the water.
The civil society organisation Pamoja Trust from Nairobi, Kenya, is a pioneer in the use of digital tools in community development and risk mitigation. To better understand climate-related vulnerabilities, it conducts settlement profiling research in selected informal settlements. Data gathered here are both economic and non-economic, including the destruction of houses and household assets, lost income and livelihoods, health impacts and psychosocial distress, community infrastructure, education, water and sanitation, cultural heritage and social cohesion. The collected data has been used in direct engagement with authorities and other stakeholders, e.g. in the Kenyan Urban Forum, a national platform for climate actors.
Further, through capacity-building measures, Pamoja Trust strengthens the digital skills of leaders of social movements, community groups and human rights defenders. They learn to use innovative technologies, such as GIS-U-CODE and STDM (Social Tenure Domain Model).
STDM reflects ‘people-land’ relationships independent of the level of formality, legality and technical accuracy. It is a specialised version of the ISO-approved Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) for participatory data collection, analysis and presentation of spatial data from informal settlements.
This community-led research documents losses and damages from climate change impacts – both from slow-onset climate events and hazards such as flash floods, rising temperatures and heavy rainfall. Through a climate justice perspective, environmental factors like location, topography and soil typology, as well as social and economic factors, demographic structures, health, education and livelihoods systems are included. This helps analyse current and reduce future vulnerabilities. For instance, the collected data has already contributed to a concrete improvement for the communities through increased risk awareness and evidence-based advocacy, as well as recognition by authorities as a step toward integrating informal settlements into urban planning and disaster response strategies. This approach captures both economic and so-called non-economic losses and damages to build resilience through cultural adaptive strategies. It also helps to close data gaps through participatory action research and community-informed practices.
Actions for Change
Policy decisions at all governance levels – from local to global – rely on localised and evidence-based data if they are to deliver truly transformative change, including climate justice. Community-led data collection and analysis, as used by Pamoja Trust, are key to this end.
Both national and urban climate planning need to include informal settlements in their analysis and policies, such as their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The forthcoming IPCC Special Report on Cities and Climate Change (planned for 2027) presents a unique opportunity to further sensitise states to informal settlements in both the urban as well as climate discourse. A rights-based approach can further lead to more just, endowed and accessible funding schemes to face ocurred losses and damages.
From a human-rights perspective, forced evictions and displacements in the name of climate adaptation must be addressed as a human rights violation. Bringing informal settlements into the climate debate can also enrich discussions sparked by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change.
