As Countries Step Back, Neighborhoods Unlock Climate Action

The transformation of  Buenos Aires’ Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood over the last decade is remarkable. What was once an informal settlement lacking sewers and clean water is now a thriving, diverse community where residents own their homes.  A new street system and electrical grid power, businesses like a food court and organic garden, as well as a range of transportation options. Against a backdrop of high inflation, GDP contraction and political unrest, Rodrigo Bueno’s evolution proves that neighborhoods can hold the key to unlocking progress on climate and social equity, even in the face of national and international turmoil.

Finding ways neighborhoods can transform is especially inspiring in our current political environment. Within the United States, the new administration is rolling back critical climate programs and slashing funding for many equity-focused projects. Within Europe, national spending is shifting toward other priorities. As a result, opportunities to make progress on the issues that directly affect people's everyday lives — housing, climate action and health — feel like they are disappearing.

But cities — especially neighborhoods — hold enormous potential for creating direct benefits improving the lives of people on the frontlines of the climate crisis. High-level policy changes don’t always trickle down to a person’s lived reality, but efforts to plant trees along a busy corridor or upgrade housing with reflective roofs for better cooling can mean a substantial improvement in quality of life. Especially amid times of global and national uncertainty, neighborhoods can be an avenue for tangible and meaningful transformation.

Here we look at how neighborhoods around the world, like Rodrigo Bueno, are already making progress to create climate-resilient affordable housing, improve residents’ health and respond to climate change.

Housing: The Foundation for Resilient Communities and Cities

For city residents, housing is the foundational element of urban life. If one’s housing situation is unstable or inadequate, everything else — from work to travel to forming connections — becomes much more difficult. At the same time, efforts to enhance the resilience and stability of housing in a community can be transformative.

In Teresina, Brazil, the more than 450 families that call Residencial Edgar Gayoso home were forced to travel long distances from the city’s northern periphery to the city center because they lacked access to jobs, green and recreational spaces and core urban services like medical facilities and markets close by. But through the IKI Transformative Urban Coalitions project, the residents co-created and implemented a comprehensive overhaul of the community’s central avenue. This once-unwelcoming space is now a public area with a playground, outdoor gym equipment, a bus stop, shade structures, a library, and gardens. Nearby, community members added plants and trees and painted murals on the walls with local artists and children. Initiating this transformation in Residencial Edgar Gayoso not only gave residents spaces for joy, but also showed them that by organizing together, they could achieve more progress in the future.

In Freetown, the capital of Sierre Leone, the community of Moyiba, an informal hillside settlement, experienced devastating landslides and flooding from increasing rains. Working closely with the UrbanShift project — a joint initiative of WRI, C40 Cities, UN Environment Programme, and ICLEI — the community used data to identify housing that was especially at risk, and to lay out a plan for strengthening the surrounding community’s resilience. Equipping the community with data and tools to understand their own challenges and take action not only strengthened their ability to prepare and respond to extreme weather events but also tightened the community’s connection to each other and gave residents a sense of agency over their circumstances.

Adaptation: Building Resilience from the Ground Up

Climate change is a global phenomenon, but its impacts are borne locally by individuals and communities. By addressing these challenges in neighborhoods, cities have an opportunity to tangibly improve residents’ lives while enhancing the city’s overall resilience.  

This is most evident when it comes to extreme heat. Extreme heat is a growing challenge in cities across the world, but all it takes is crossing the street from a leafy, shaded sidewalk to a wide-open stretch of asphalt to understand that its impacts can vary block by block.

Cape Town, South Africa, experienced a record scorching day of 111 degrees F  in January 2024. The city’s central business district was practically impassable, but nearby, people gathered under trees in a shaded park for relief. Knowing that its heat challenges will only continue to intensify, Cape Town’s climate change department is now working to create high-resolution thermal comfort maps to identify hot-spot areas  and prioritize greening interventions, with the support of WRI. As a result, the city has already modeled the cooling potential of planting new trees on city streets and creating more shaded areas. These models are informing an action plan to enhance its urban nature and cool infrastructure.

Across the ocean in Cleveland, Ohio, Mayor Justin Bibb, undeterred by recent environmental rollbacks at the national level, set an ambitious goal to give every resident access to green spaces within a 10-minute walk by the year 2045, by converting abandoned lots to parks and pursuing other efforts. Public green space is essential for hyperlocal climate resilience and adaptation. Not only do parks and green spaces, which are often lacking in under-resourced communities, help lower neighborhood temperatures and improve air quality, but they also provide space for community members to meet and form connections. “It’s going to be up to mayors and governors to really enact and sustain the momentum around addressing climate change at the local level,” Bibb told NextCity on his decision. Other cities can make strides to implement similar initiatives — which are vital for both climate adaptation and resident well-being — by mapping their current public green spaces and identifying opportunities to equitably expand it. 

Flood risk is another climate impact that must be addressed locally. While major flood events can blanket an entire city, as happened in Porto Alegre, Brazil, early last year, for many urban neighborhoods, flooding is a more banal yet ever-present and damaging challenge for many urban neighborhoods. As climate change intensifies, rivers more frequently overflow, impacting nearby communities. Development has encroached on riverbeds and wetlands, hampering their ability to absorb excess stormwater. But neighborhoods can take steps at the very local level to mitigate their flood risks.

In Maranguape, Brazil, residents near the Pirapora River, which runs through the city, have been increasingly coping with flooding and pollution. In response, the city is working to revitalize the area and improve the local ecosystem with the support of WRI Brasil’s Nature-Based Solutions Accelerator. Using rain gardens, biofiltering gardens, evapotranspiration basins and biodigester pits, the project foresees the implementation of sustainable rainwater management, the revitalization of the Pirapora River and socio-environmental improvements for the community.

Health: Understanding Risks and Designing for Wellbeing

Amid accelerating climate change, people who live in cities face acute risks. Not only are cities warming more quickly than suburban and rural areas, but inequitable development patterns and access to jobs, education and health care render already-marginalized people especially vulnerable. By focusing on improving peoples’ health in communities and neighborhoods — with a focus on vulnerable populations — cities can ensure that they’re supporting wellbeing where it’s needed most.

Just as extreme heat is a crucial focus for cities in adapting to and mitigating climate change locally, mitigating heat is also essential for community health. In Brazil, a comprehensive project is currently underway to map various conditions — from building resilience to residents’ economic circumstances — of neighborhoods in the cities of Campinas and Belo Horizonte to understand how residents intersect with extreme-heat-related health impacts, such as heart disease, pregnancy complications or premature death. The cities then aim to work from the ground up to implement sustainable infrastructure changes that counter the heat.

In India, cities face an undeniable challenge when it comes to providing a safe, supportive environment for children. Over 8 million Indian children under six years old reside in urban slums that lack key infrastructure and services. This can create stress that has lifelong cognitive and health impacts. Rather than trying to tackle this challenge at the highest level, cities in India took a different approach by focusing locally. The Nurturing Neighborhoods Challenge invited over 60 cities to prepare proposals for pilot projects to improve public spaces with children’s needs in mind. The challenge spurred cities to quickly implement and study solutions like creating pop-up play spaces and redesigning early childhood development centers. Each city could pursue an approach to fit its local context — like a toddler-friendly zone in Eat Street, a recreational street in Kakinada, and an accessible play space in Arjun Pura Slum in Indore — and work quickly to get the projects implemented within neighborhoods. 

Why Focusing on Neighborhoods Matters

While it may feel small in scale, hyperlocal action against climate and wellbeing risks is both meaningful and measurable. By focusing on neighborhood-scale transformation, cities can make progress against climate change for their most-impacted residents in a way, like Rodrigo Bueno has done, that helps people with their most foundational daily needs — a place to live, a safe environment and improved health. In times of political gridlock, neighborhoods are a place that can invite innovation, inspire action and encourage the spread of similar transformations in other communities.

Cover photo:  By WRI