Afew years before the 2015 Paris Agreement, I joined The Global High-Level Advisory Committee to the Climate Justice Dialogue—a group chaired by former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, and then-President of the World Resources Institute, Andrew Steer. With a remit of exploring social justice and climate change issues, the group’s output was part of the document that later became the Paris Agreement. 

Before this, I had little or no experience working on climate issues. I had always been wary of the existence of a robust environment protection lobby that viewed slum dwellers as destroyers of natural habitats, polluters of rivers, and encroachers on open spaces reserved for animals. My role as an activist working with people with low incomes informed how I engaged with the group, which included leaders from politics, science, business, civil society and academia. I found myself constantly arguing against the prevailing logic. That is: given the inability of policy and planning to anticipate, accommodate and ensure spaces for the urban poor (who are moving to cities in droves, in many cases as a last-ditch survival strategy because cities remain the primary places of opportunity), the only survival strategy for people forced to migrate from rural areas affected by underinvestment was to become encroachers, living illegally wherever they could.

Since participating on the Committee that led to the Paris Agreement in 2015, I have explored how we can foreground the lives of the urban poor in our thinking about climate change, development and financing. It’s clear that this integration is crucial at both the city and national level, and that a failure to understand climate science and acknowledge its central role in development processes at both these levels will result in maladaptation that will have generational consequences.

Between 2015 and 2020, I dedicated myself to advocating for people living informally to have a voice in climate discussions and policy. It’s a no-brainer. After all, the poorest in our societies are often the most vulnerable, and are far more affected by climate incidents than those with better infrastructure. I learnt that while there is a glaring difference in resilience planning and investments between the North and the South, the discrepancy can be equally exclusionary between rich and poor in wealthier cities across Europe and North America, especially for those living informally.

I had started bringing these realisations into my work with the National Slum Dwellers Federation in India and Slum Dwellers International—two networks with whom I have worked closely for decades on the fight for the rights of the urban poor—when Covid-19 pandemic hit.  

In the isolation of lockdown, I worked alongside a global network of colleagues and associates to create a series of online dialogues with women savings collectors, talking about the challenges they faced during the pandemic. The struggles that surfaced included accessing information to help make decisions on whether or not to be vaccinated, adequately feeding their children, and generally being overwhelmed by the stresses of the pandemic in all areas of their lives.

Interestingly, the conversations began to coalesce around an unexpected subject. Many participants shared how their homes were increasingly vulnerable—roofs were flying off because they weren’t correctly trussed to the beams. They were also leaky in the unseasonal rains that were becoming increasingly common. Moreover, the women were unprepared for these problems, and their responses were inadequate—often expensive yet temporary. Thus in addition to dealing with the socio-economic, physical and mental health stresses induced by the pandemic, many women in our network were having to deal with their homes not being able to withstand extreme weather conditions. 

In further discussions, the alarming but not unexpected reality that few households in informal settlements worldwide actually have any form of secure tenure quickly surfaced. This is critical to understand, because tenure often determines who can or cannot access subsidies essential to home improvements. These discussions also revealed that most informal household dwellings are generally designed, constructed and financed through peer learning: meaning imitating neighbours or acquaintances when building a house, or just getting the advice and services of someone with some experience in formal construction. This was an opportunity to put considerations like extreme weather on peoples’ radars. 

In additional deliberations, professional activists and academic researchers mostly maintained the orthodox view that secure tenure preceded and superseded any talk of house construction. Though focus on tenure has produced multiple policies and outcomes in the last four decades, most people living informally across the globe still struggle with gaining any form of secure tenure. All of these insights led to the creation of Roof Over Our Heads (ROOH), a campaign and learning programme whose primary focus is to help residents find solutions to improve their houses and give them a level of climate resilience, whether they have secure tenure or not. 

This work is essential as it targets and addresses home improvement and building resilience in a manner that addresses the vital, basic needs of a highly vulnerable constituency. In four decades of working and advocating for the rights of the urban poor, I have yet to see these rights prioritised, let alone fully acknowledged or seriously taken up at any level. Most Architecture, Planning and Design schools do not consider these issues in their curricula, and financing mechanisms for upgrading homes do not cater for groups without secure land tenure.

Ultimately, our ambition is to establish 100 Roof Over Our Heads (ROOH) “labs” in 20 countries across the globe. Each lab will consist of groups of women residents in informal neighbourhoods, working with young built-environment professionals to assess and experiment with incremental solutions to strengthen climate resilience. 

The approach is two-pronged. First, we are creating a robust framework so we can assess the resilience of the materials residents are using to build, and understand the design of existing informal homes across multiple territories. Such a tool will aid our understanding of the cost of each dwelling, the supply chains in which construction materials are obtained, and how and from whom construction services are procured. In this phase, we intend also to gain a fine-grained understanding of community histories—how they came to be, various disasters they have endured, etc. This first line of enquiry will be the basis for building the initial benchmark database to identify the settlements and residents with whom we can work. 

In the second phase, we will take a solutions-oriented approach to exploring alternative designs, materials and construction systems. Here we will also closely explore the design and introduction of financing tools that enable people to actively save for and improve their access to affordably structured loans to upgrade their homes incrementally. 

We have already tested several exploratory labs in India. Using their outcomes, we will develop an aggregated data infrastructure platform, where each additional lab can input issues and questions about their local realities. Communities and their networks can scan across the platform to find what might work to address their specific requirements.

In multiple conversations about Roof Over Our Heads—with academia, funding agencies and global institutions—the one constant is an immediate, almost predictable tendency to emphasise the risks: “What if they don’t finish the whole process? How will you raise funds? What if you can’t find a solution?” 

The answer is simple. If we don’t take the risk of exploring what is needed, we will never arrive at any solutions. 

We are doing this research because we need solutions that bring us closer to creating affordable and climate resilient habitats that speak to the needs of people with low incomes. We expect to learn many things, including what might make people remain engaged with the process, walk away, or stop participating. We might learn what externalities—cultural or other—determine or influence the decisions (good or dysfunctional) the women’s collectives and their sister groups will take as they seek to improve life in their neighbourhoods. With our methodology in place, multiple cities and countries interested in partnering to explore the viability of ROOH, and universities worldwide keen to develop a curriculum and participate in this process, we are ready to start building solutions together.