Climate Change, Health, and Adaptation in African Informal Settlements

This transdisciplinary book explores how climate extremes - specifically extreme heat and urban flooding - are experienced, governed, and resisted within African informal settlements.

Focusing on the nexus of environmental stress, public health inequities, infrastructural fragility, and adaptation politics, the authors unpack how these converging crises disproportionately affect marginalised urban populations and expose the limitations of dominant climate governance models. The book takes Cape Town as its principal empirical site, particularly the informal settlements of Khayelitsha, Philippi, and Masiphumelele. These settlements serve as “urban laboratories” through which the book investigates the everyday, embodied, and gendered impacts of climate change. While deeply grounded in the Cape Town context, the book also draws comparative insights from similarly climate-vulnerable and socially complex informal settlements in Lagos (Makoko), Nairobi (Kibera and Mukuru), Accra (Agbogbloshie), and Dhaka (Korail), situating African experiences within a broader Global South urban adaptation discourse. The book is structured around eight thematic chapters, each advancing a layered understanding of climate risk and resilience through different empirical, theoretical, and methodological lenses. Through this multi-layered exploration, Climate Change, Health, and Adaptation in African Informal Settlements positions informal settlements not as passive recipients of adaptation, but as generative sites of innovation, knowledge, and political agency. It offers a compelling and much-needed intervention into both academic and policy debates, arguing that reimagining climate adaptation from the margins is not only possible—it is essential.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of urban development, climate justice, health equity, and environmental governance.