Renewing climate planning locally to attend the 11th Sustainable Development Goal in the tropics

Abstract

In the last seven years, tropical cities with a climate plan have tripled compared to the previous seven years. According to the 11th United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal, climate planning should significantly increase by 2030. The Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction (2015) and the New urban agenda signed in Quito (2016) indicate how to achieve this goal through analysis, categories of plans and specific measures. This chapter identifies the main obstacles to the significant increase in tropical human settlements with a climate plan and the possible solutions. First of all, the distribution and trend at 2030 of tropical human settlements are ascertained. Then local access to information on damage, hazard, exposure, vulnerability and risk, and the consideration of these aspects in the national guides to local climate planning are verified. Lastly, the categories of plans and climate measures recommended by the United Nations are compared with those that are most common today, using a database of 401 climate plans for 338 tropical cities relating to 41 countries. The chapter highlights the fact that the prescription for treating tropical cities affected by climate change has been prepared without an accurate diagnosis. Significantly increasing climate planning must consider that small-medium human settlements in the Tropics will prevail at least until 2030. And most effort will be required from Developing and Least Developed Countries. The recommendations of the United Nations concerning the preliminary analyses ignore the fact that local authorities usually do not have access to the necessary information. Climate plans and recommended measures are not those currently in use. We propose three areas of action to facilitate the mainstreaming of the recommendations in the tropical context. They require a renewal of the local planning process if we intend to reach the 11th SDG by 2030.