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Unprecedented international cooperation in 2015 resulted in the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement (COP21). These emergent regimes will influence public policies to guide nations towards a more sustainable future. This thesis links the Paris Agreement to Urban Informality. Informal urban poor communities (slums) are often neglected from policies derivatives from global agreements. The agreement saw for the first time all the countries of the world proposing Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to limit greenhouse gasses emissions and combat climate change. The literature on the agreement has followed two main streams; on one side, many studies quantify the sum of the INDCs to determine the overall effectiveness of the agreement. On the other, studies focus on analyzing potential strategies that can help countries or regions (mostly in the developed world) achieve their pledges. Significant gaps have resulted from this. For instance, what will be the policies derivatives of the agreement in developing countries? And, what is the proposed role of informal urban poor communities in the Paris Agreement and INDCs?
The initial hypothesis of the thesis was that while developing countries are widely considered the most vulnerable to climate change, inside the developing world, the informal urban poor are the most vulnerable and have been left out of policies derivatives from global or national accords. This thesis analyzed, using social sciences methodologies, the INDCs of 28 highly urbanized developing countries and with high prevalence of informal settlements in order to understand the proposed role of slums in post COP21 policies. The analysis uncovered significant flaws such as that the majority of analyzed countries do not have any specific actions or policies for these territories. At the same time, most of the analyzed INDCs are conditional to international financial support and technology transfer, which limits their reliability. In a way, the wounds of the Kyoto Protocol are still present in Paris. The contributions of developing countries will be crucial for the emergent agreement to succeed; this is especially true after the United States (the planet’s second bigger contributor to global warming) publicly left the agreement.
In this line, considering the importance of developing countries for the success of the agreement and taking into account the needs of climate policies in informal urban poor communities, this thesis proposed an implementation framework for slum upgrading projects that can contribute to developing countries pledge’s with mitigation and adaption strategies, and at the same time help increase the adaptive capacity, resiliency and connectivity of slums. The framework is built upon the structure of the INDCs, as well as on extensive literature review, field research in informal settlements in Manila and Santiago de los Caballeros, and experts interviews.
This thesis aims at contributing to the current debates and discourses on urban informality by expanding the understanding of the critical role of these urban territories in global scale climate policies. | en_US |