Center Informal Settlements, Traditional and Disenfranchised Communities In Global Climate Decisions

Introduction

Through this open letter, we put forward our demands as those born and raised in favelas, along with collectives, organizations, movements, and allies of informal settlements and people living in inadequate housing and at climate risk, experiencing environmental racism around the world. We call for climate justice to be the central goal of global discussions!

Informal settlements are the first, most common and essential form of housing for displaced populations worldwide. And, in the context of the climate emergency, they are those most at risk from floods, landslides, droughts, heat waves, and urban fires. Despite these adverse conditions—caused primarily by public sector neglect—informal settlements are equally characterized by a set of strengths and potentialities that often go overlooked. They are resilient, evolving flexibly in response to opportunities and challenges, while producing culture, fostering solidarity economies and helping residents gradually realize their right to the city.

Despite their central relevance, no COP has placed informal settlements at the center of discussions in a way that reflects their vital importance to our success in mitigating the climate crisis.

Without residents of informal settlements at the center of climate discussions, we are neglecting essential knowledge, practices, and potential in responding to this crisis. A quarter of the world’s urban population is not devoid of ideas, solutions, knowledge and wisdom. On the contrary, due to historic neglect from the public sector, residents of informal settlements are, fundamentally, “problem-solvers.” Without government support, they face structural inequalities and, consequently, create public policy in practice: developing direct responses to their needs through solidarity networks and sustainable alternative proposals. Those who pay close attention know that these communities are spaces of solution-building, the first to react in solidarity, as in rescues during extreme climate events. And their responses are organized, with preventive actions unfolding as best they can, no matter how harsh the circumstances. These communities are not simply vulnerable: they are key to solving the climate crisis. Climate solutions and climate justice will only be possible with their active participation, recognition and leadership.

Demands

1. Place the most vulnerable settlements in your countries at the heart of climate decisions, recognizing that caring for the most vulnerable means caring for everyone. This requires ensuring that different voices from these areas are included in decision-making, particularly different types of communities, women and matriarchs, young and old, ethnic groups with less access to power, etc. Climate solutions for informal settlements can only be built together with residents: municipal climate action plans require the full participation of communities. Citizens’ assemblies must be carefully established and supported. Once established, the administrations in which they are located must follow through on the decisions taken, and these decisions must be included in the climate governance of their cities.

2. Invest at the local level in ways that promote and value the local population, their ancestral and grassroots knowledge, and sense of belonging (including to the land and nature), centering investments on those most at risk. This includes community markets, community-based environmental climate education, and decentralized social solutions and technologies that value solutions conceived, adapted, and implemented by the community itself. Shifting the focus to investments that strengthen everyone's ability to meet their needs in ways that respect natural systems—rather than false solutions that encourage centralized planning processes and top-down policies—will enable scaling effective processes in a healthy, equitable, and emancipatory manner, through the sharing and realization of power among all of us. This requires learning from nature: decentralized ecosystems are more resilient. Illustrating the point with Rio’s favelas alone, we can find exemplary solutions related to every SDG, including: green roofs for cooling, vertical gardens, community solar cooperatives, youth hubs, community gardens, urban and peri-urban agriculture, agroforestry systems, bio-systems for sanitation, community museums, intergenerational memory circles, herb cultivation, pedestrian-centered communities, and community land trusts for land regularization.

3. Climate funds must prioritize Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and foster renewable energies in informal settlements. Following climate disasters, these areas must be compensated and included in the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD). Regarding carbon credits, consideration must be given to investing resources in projects developed within and by the communities.

4. Ensure that consolidated settlements and communities—those that have built a shared history, identity and connection to the land on which they live and with one another—and wish to remain are able to do so safely and with quality services, in particular regarding: drinking water, sanitation (which goes beyond just treated sewage and includes clean tributaries, drainage, waste collection—including education—and community recycling, etc.), nature-based risk containment, technical orientation and materials for safe housing, nutritious food emphasizing food sovereignty, holistic health centers (which also treat climate anxiety) and schools with strong grassroots environmental climate projects and programs, public transport, tree planting and heat island mitigation, community solar energy solutions, shared spaces for children and adults to address collective needs (such as for gatherings, gardening, cultural events, etc.), and tenure security, which may or may not be achieved through private individual property rights.

5. Guarantee, in settlements where resettlement is desired: safe and adequate housing (defined by security, access to services, affordability, habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural appropriateness) close to relevant economic opportunities and with guarantees of the same quality services and rights listed in item 4 above. Governments need to plan for land to be made available with reasonable accessibility for the resettlement of communities affected by extreme weather events, as well as financial resources from climate funds for the reconstruction of habitability and ways of life.

6. Invest in rural, Indigenous, quilombola (in Brazil), fishing and other traditional communities in ways that respect and honor their knowledge, customs, wisdom, and connection to the land and environment, valuing this bond in ways that generate authentic pride and the ability to remain and care for those lands, cultures, traditions and economies.

Everyone will benefit from working together in this way. Climate solutions must come from the frontline, from local communities who have been catalyzing strategies they themselves have developed. These solutions require effective participation and the integration of all people.

Just five years ago, we all experienced a global pandemic together. Informal settlements were then, as they are with the climate crisis, those most impacted. Covid-19 made clear that we are all interconnected. It showed that what happens anywhere affects us all. We also saw clearly that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable. And that communities bound by solidarity and with stable homes are essential.

No decision affecting the climate should be made without including those most impacted—and the solutions they bring—in the decision-making process.

Our climate crisis was produced through the same dominant, centralized, hierarchical, top-down system that today governs climate decision-making. However, the solution to this crisis must engage all people. We are all part of the solution for this new moment the world is facing. Given the real impacts of climate change on our communities, we demand climate and economic justice from decision-makers. Nothing that impacts us, without us! There is no future without favelas and disenfranchised populations at the center of global climate decisions.

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*In numbers, a conservative estimate of 12% of the global population lives in informal settlements, corresponding to 23.5% of the urban population. However, more broadly 34% of the world's population lives in inadequate housing, with the UN predicting this number will grow to 40% of the world’s population by 2030. In some nations, such as Sudan and the Central African Republic, over 90% of the population lives in informal settlements. In Brazil, the city with the highest percentage of people living in informal settlements is Belém, home to COP30, where 57% of the city's population resides in favelas. Inadequate housing is not a problem only in the Global South. In the Global North, 318 million have no homes at all. And increasingly, those with homes in areas impacted by climate change become stranded, unable to rebuild, find buyers or seek a new life.