Ecological Design: Strategies for the vulnerable city: Adapting precarious areas in Latin America and the Caribbean to climate change
According to the United Nations, approximately three out of five cities in the world with at least 500,000 inhabitants are at high risk of natural disasters. Without better efforts to mitigate and adapt, cities will become more crowded, warmer and less biodiverse in the future. The environmental and climate crisis accentuates inequality, as the most socially and economically vulnerable groups are more exposed to natural hazards and generally have less access to infrastructure and ecosystem services. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most vulnerable populations often live in informal, precarious or popular settlements. In recent years, significant progress has been made in rethinking these settlements, developing intervention strategies to improve the quality of life, safety and opportunities of their inhabitants. Today it is essential to effectively incorporate climate criteria in urban interventions. Ecological Design dimensions the impacts of the climate crisis on the most vulnerable areas of our cities – the informal city – while reflecting on how to protect those who are most strongly affected by the consequences of climate change. It also provides new lenses for analyzing risk and designing nature-based solutions in precarious, informal, popular, vulnerable urban settlements to make the informal city more resilient to the climate pressures that will come in the coming decades.