The research team, led by Samkelisiwe Khanyile, combined post-classification change detection in a geographic information system with chi-square statistical testing and a spatial clustering index. Their raw material was the South African National Land Cover dataset, built from Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper imagery for 1990 and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager imagery for 2020, both at a 30-meter resolution. The original 73 and 72 land cover classes were collapsed into 12 comparable categories, allowing every one of nearly 2.9 million pixels to be traced from its 1990 state to its 2020 state. The resulting transition matrix, a 12-by-12 table of conversions, became the evidentiary backbone for asking whether landscape change in a post-mining region follows logic, chance, or policy failure.

The statistical verdict was unambiguous. The chi-square test returned a value of 11,319,251.69 with 121 degrees of freedom and a p-value below 0.001, and 141 of the 144 possible transitions proved significant. Cramér’s V, a measure of effect size, reached 0.60, indicating that the transitions substantially reshaped the composition of the landscape rather than nudging it at the margins. In plain terms, the land did not drift randomly into new uses. Institutional, economic, and planning forces drove the conversions, which means the inequities embedded in those conversions are also the product of decisions, not accidents.

The headline numbers tell a story of paradox. On one hand, 54.53 square kilometers of former mining land, 37.8 percent of the mining footprint recorded in 1990, successfully transitioned to natural vegetation, a conversion that occurred far more often than chance would predict and that points to genuine revegetation efforts. On the other hand, the wider landscape degraded. Natural vegetation shrank by 150.33 square kilometers, planted vegetation plummeted by 47.6 percent, waterbodies and wetlands declined by more than 12 percent, and barren land surged by 376.4 percent. Site-level rehabilitation, in other words, could not counteract landscape-scale ecological loss, a finding that echoes international evidence that point-source restoration rarely offsets cumulative regional damage.

Urbanization compounded the pressure. Built-up formal areas grew by 60.74 square kilometers, commercial areas nearly doubled with a 37.41 square kilometer expansion, and informal settlements exploded by 42.91 square kilometers, an astonishing 847.89 percent increase. Informal settlements also showed a persistence rate of only 45.42 percent, meaning they are constantly forming, dissolving, and reforming. Crucially, the spatial clustering index derived from the chi-square residuals reached 99,240.66, far above the 1,000-to-5,000 range expected from random distributions. The changes concentrated in Soweto, Tsakane, Simunye, Daveyton, and Mohlakeng, townships historically designated for Black residents under apartheid and deliberately sited near mining operations.

That geographic concentration is where the study’s environmental justice argument becomes sharpest. Environmental justice scholarship has long held that hazards are disproportionately placed near marginalized populations, but demonstrating this with quantitative landscape evidence has been rare in mineralized urban contexts of the Global South. Here, three lines of evidence converge: the transitions are systematic, they cluster in previously disadvantaged areas, and they include residential development on contaminated land. The belt hosts more than 270 tailings storage facilities covering roughly 400 square kilometers, some of them radioactive because of uranium co-occurring with gold. Provincial authorities identified 157 of 374 mine residue sites as radioactive, spanning 220 square kilometers.

Perhaps the most damning finding concerns the buffer zones that were supposed to keep people away from that contamination. In 2003, the Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development established pollution buffers around mine residue sites, later codified at distances of 500 to 1,500 meters under the 2012 Gauteng Pollution Buffers Policy, amended in 2017. Yet the analysis found that 0.80 square kilometers of mining land was converted to formal and informal built-up areas, placing residents directly adjacent to potentially contaminated ground despite explicit regulatory protection. The study also documents the reverse flow: 41.55 square kilometers of natural vegetation was converted to mining-related land use, showing that extraction continued consuming green space even as the sector contracted overall, with mining land declining only marginally from 144.25 to 143.28 square kilometers.

The authors frame this as a policy-implementation gap with two possible readings, both unjust. Either mining companies successfully defended their land holdings through regulatory power, monopolizing urban land while housing-poor populations are pushed onto the highest-risk zones, or mining actors strategically permitted settlement in buffer zones to monetize their land assets. Either way, the injustice is both spatial and temporal: apartheid-era mining footprints continue to structure environmental exposure and development opportunity three decades after the regulatory regime that produced them was formally dismantled. South Africa’s post-apartheid legal architecture, including the Constitution’s environmental rights clause, the National Environmental Management Act, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act with its mandatory rehabilitation provisions, and the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act, has not translated into protection on the ground.

The sustainability implications reach beyond South Africa. The findings show direct misalignment with Sustainable Development Goal 11 on sustainable cities, since urban growth in the mining belt has been predominantly informal and hazard-adjacent rather than planned, and with SDG 15 on terrestrial ecosystems, given the vegetation losses and barren land expansion. Gauteng’s position on a watershed divide between the Crocodile, Olifants, and Vaal river systems makes the wetland losses particularly troubling, as the landscape loses its capacity to retain and filter water precisely when demand is escalating. Acid mine drainage, soil contamination, and radioactive dust remain persistent threats that satellite imagery cannot capture, which the authors acknowledge as a limitation alongside their reliance on two time points and pre-classified 30-meter data with 88 to 96 percent accuracy.

What distinguishes this study is its replicable methodological template: transition matrices validated by chi-square testing, effect sizes, and clustering indices, all benchmarked against regulatory buffer zones. Because the changes are systematic, the authors argue, they can be deliberately reversed through targeted intervention. Their prescriptions include stronger regulatory enforcement with meaningful penalties, affordable housing provision to relieve pressure on contaminated land, participatory rehabilitation planning that centers community voices, and accountability mechanisms grounded in independently verifiable landscape-scale evidence rather than self-reported site compliance. A periodic land cover monitoring framework benchmarked against the provincial buffer policy could, they suggest, turn satellite pixels into enforceable metrics. The Witwatersrand’s golden scar will not heal on its own, but for the first time its growth, its healing patches, and its human costs have been measured with a precision that regulators can no longer ignore.

Subject of Research: Mining-driven land use and land cover change and environmental justice along the Witwatersrand mining belt, Gauteng, South Africa, 1990–2020

Article Title: Mining Legacies and Environmental Injustice: Systematic Mining-Led LULC Change in the Witwatersrand Mining Belt, Gauteng, South Africa (1990–2020)

Article References: Khanyile, S., Tsoriyo, W., & Mahamuza, P. (2026). Mining Legacies and Environmental Injustice: Systematic Mining-Led LULC Change in the Witwatersrand Mining Belt, Gauteng, South Africa (1990–2020). Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 336. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02543-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02543-9

Keywords: land use land cover change, mining, environmental justice, Witwatersrand, Gauteng, remote sensing, GIS, chi-square analysis, informal settlements, mine rehabilitation, tailings storage facilities, sustainable development goals

The scale of the global challenge is enormous. Around 3.5 billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation, and more than half of them live in rapidly expanding urban areas. In sub-Saharan Africa, over 60 percent of urban dwellers reside in areas without the infrastructure to provide sanitation services. Informal settlements like BM Section, which packs roughly 14,000 residents onto 32.42 hectares of land owned by the City of Cape Town, illustrate the dilemma: land tenure is insecure, housing is overcrowded and precarious, and unemployment is high, making conventional sewered sanitation technically and politically difficult to deliver.

Container based sanitation works by capturing excreta in sealable containers that are transported to semi-centralised facilities for treatment. The technology ranges from small portable toilets resembling camping equipment to larger units moved by vehicles, and the World Health Organization and UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Programme classify it as improved sanitation that can count as safely managed when appropriately serviced. In BM Section, the City of Cape Town provides household container based sanitation in the form of portable flush toilets, known locally as pota-pota, consisting of a toilet seat and two detachable storage cartridges used in rotation. A private contractor is supposed to collect filled cartridges three times a week and return clean ones directly to each household.

The research team, led by Mmeli Dube of the University of the Western Cape and Dani Barrington of the University of Western Australia, used a participatory method called Photovoice, in which thirteen residents were given disposable cameras and asked to photograph their sanitation experiences. The photographs then served as prompts during in-depth interviews, allowing participants to document conditions that conventional interviews often miss. Participants were purposively selected along axes of gender, disability, income and exposure to shocks such as flooding and fire, with roughly half using household portable flush toilets and half relying on shared sanitation. The team analysed the material using Winkler’s five normative contents of the Human Right to Sanitation, namely availability, accessibility, affordability, safety and acceptability, combined with Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality.

The findings on shared sanitation were stark. Chemical and container toilets are notionally shared among five households, but residents reported that the real ratios are far higher, and public ablution blocks serving hundreds of people sometimes had only one working toilet out of five on the female side. Keli, a middle-aged unemployed mother, described a chemical toilet 100 metres from her home that was sometimes full of maggots, unstable in the wind, and fitted with a door that would not close properly, exposing users to passers-by. Because the toilet offered so little privacy during daylight hours, she resorted to using it at night, despite the risks of robbery and sexual assault that she said were frequently reported in her area.

Other participants had fared even worse. Bonani, an unemployed woman with care responsibilities, gave up on the shared toilet entirely after conflicts over keys, which were hoarded by more socially powerful residents who changed the locks and distributed keys only to people they preferred. She now practices open defecation in a field with her children, navigating flooded paths and fearing snakes, assault and the stigma of managing menstruation without any disposal facilities. Mila, who uses an ablution block, reported contracting an infection she traced to the filthy, blocked toilets, and at night she urinates and defecates in a bucket that she empties into a drain. The researchers found that exclusion from sanitation was not only a consequence of individual vulnerabilities but also of unequal power relations governing access to infrastructure.

Household portable flush toilets performed better in some respects, but only for those with the resources to adapt them. Sihle, a 60-year-old partially blind woman, described how her life improved when she received a pota-pota, which her son-in-law sheltered in a repurposed storage cubicle next to her shack. With a phone torch to light her way, she could use the toilet safely at night without depending on anyone. Yet her story is the exception. John, who has lived with disability since childhood and has a paralysed left arm, could not use his household toilet safely because it stood unsheltered on uneven ground, forcing him to balance by holding onto the sides of adjacent shacks. For him, a shared toilet with a solid structure was actually more acceptable than his own household facility.

The study’s central insight is that the technology’s benefits depend entirely on users’ capacity to adapt it, what the researchers describe as a form of implicit infrastructure in which residents complete or compensate for infrastructural shortcomings through their own labour and money. To make a portable flush toilet private, safe and dignified, users must build secure cubicles, level the ground, install locks, acquire torches, and rebuild after fires or floods. Lizwe, a young man with memory loss and eyesight problems living with seven family members, kept the family toilet in an unlocked storeroom where strangers used it without permission, and his household avoided flushing to delay filling the 16-litre cartridge, pushing waste down with broomsticks instead. When cartridges became too heavy, contractors refused to collect them, and residents carried them to the roadside themselves.

These adaptations carry serious hygiene consequences. When servicing schedules are not observed and cartridges fill faster than collections allow, users improvise by restricting toilet use to emergencies, emptying waste into drains, or resorting to shared facilities, all of which increase the likelihood of human contact with excreta and environmental contamination. The researchers calculate that a household of six, given typical excreta volumes of about 1.5 litres per person per day plus flushing water and toilet paper, could fill a standard cartridge in a single day. This complicates the classification of household container based sanitation as safely managed, because that classification assumes a level of servicing and user capacity that the reality on the ground does not support.

The authors conclude that technical provision alone is insufficient to realise the Human Right to Sanitation, and that policy and scholarship must incorporate intersectional and rights-based approaches if container based sanitation is to bring users closer to that right. In BM Section, a toilet delivered free of charge still fails the woman who cannot reach it safely, the disabled man who cannot sit on it, and the family that cannot lock it. As informal settlements grow and container based sanitation shifts from transitional fix to permanent reality by default, the study warns that monitoring frameworks based on facility type alone risk obscuring exactly the disparities in dignity, safety and access that human rights law was written to eliminate.

Subject of Research: Container based sanitation and the Human Right to Sanitation in a South African informal settlement

Article Title: Achieving the Human Right to Sanitation? Container based sanitation and intersectional vulnerabilities in a South African informal settlement

Article References: Dube, M., Anciano, F., Ofori, A. D., Mabaso, L., & Barrington, D. J. (2026). Achieving the Human Right to Sanitation? Container based sanitation and intersectional vulnerabilities in a South African informal settlement. PLOS Water, 5(10), e0000524. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000524

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000524

Keywords: sanitation, container based sanitation, informal settlements, human rights, Cape Town, intersectionality, Photovoice, portable flush toilets, Khayelitsha, water and sanitation, public health, urban inequality

The authors’ central framing is deceptively simple: sanitation functionality during floods is not a secondary concern to be addressed after the emergency passes, but a core component of how cities should prepare for epidemics. Climate change is intensifying rainfall extremes and urban flooding across many regions, and the public health consequences are sharpest where sanitation and drainage infrastructure is weakest. In an informal settlement, a single heavy storm can overwhelm onsite sanitation and fecal sludge management systems that were already operating at or beyond capacity. Pit latrines fill with floodwater, overflow, or collapse outright, and the fecal material they contained disperses into the household environment. What follows is a dramatic increase in fecal exposure, the pathway through which enteric pathogens, including Vibrio cholerae, find new hosts.

The technical logic of this exposure pathway is worth unpacking, because it explains why cholera risk can spike so rapidly after a flood. Cholera transmission is exquisitely sensitive to the dose of ingested bacteria, and flooding effectively multiplies the number of routes by which fecal contamination reaches human mouths. When latrines overflow, contamination spreads into soil and standing water; when households rely on intermittent piped supply or unsafe sources such as shallow wells and untreated surface water, the contaminated environment translates directly into contaminated drinking water. Waterborne transmission can then be amplified by person-to-person spread within crowded households, where space for isolation and hygiene is limited. The result is a setting in which a sanitation failure that lasts days can seed a transmission chain that persists for months, particularly in settlements where drainage is poor and floodwater lingers.

Lusaka, Zambia, serves as the essay’s illustrative case, and it is a revealing one. Like many rapidly growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa, Lusaka contains large informal settlements where most residents rely on onsite sanitation, pit latrines and septic tanks that must be emptied and their contents safely managed, rather than sewerage. When heavy rains strike, these containment systems are vulnerable in predictable ways: pits flood and overflow, latrine structures collapse in saturated ground, and fecal sludge that cannot be collected and treated because roads are impassable and treatment capacity is limited simply accumulates in the environment. Lusaka has experienced prolonged cholera epidemics in precisely these fragile water and sanitation conditions, and the essay draws lessons from those outbreaks about what it takes to interrupt transmission and, crucially, what it takes to prevent it from returning.

One of the most important lessons is that emergency response tools work, but only up to a point. During cholera epidemics, health authorities can deploy oral cholera vaccine campaigns, establish oral rehydration treatment points, distribute chlorine tablets for household water treatment, and intensify hygiene promotion. These measures can suppress transmission and save lives, and the experience of prolonged epidemics in fragile settings shows that they are indispensable. Yet the essay is emphatic that emergency response is not a substitute for durable services. Transmission can be pushed down temporarily while the underlying conditions, unsafe water, unreliable sanitation, and inadequate fecal sludge management, remain intact. When the emergency machinery stands down, the same vulnerabilities are waiting for the next heavy rain, and the cycle can repeat with each new flood season.

That repetition is captured in the essay’s discussion of feedback loops that sustain exposure and delay recovery. Flood-driven sanitation failure is not a one-off event that the environment simply absorbs. Inundated latrines contaminate the soil and shallow groundwater that households draw on, meaning that exposure continues long after floodwater recedes. Damaged sanitation facilities are often slow to repair in settlements where households have limited resources and responsibility for shared toilets is unclear, so people may resort to open defecation or unsafe shared facilities for extended periods. Intermittent water supply compounds the problem, because storing water in containers creates new opportunities for contamination, and rationing limits the water available for handwashing and cleaning. Each of these loops can keep fecal exposure elevated for weeks or months, sustaining the conditions under which cholera and other enteric diseases flourish and making recovery slower and more expensive than prevention would have been.

Building on recent calls for climate-resilient sanitation, the essay lays out a set of priorities that translate the concept into practice. The first is flood-resilient containment and fecal sludge services: designing latrines and septic systems that can withstand inundation, elevating or sealing containment where flooding is recurrent, and ensuring that sludge collection and treatment can continue or rapidly resume after a flood. The second concerns shared sanitation facilities, which are common in informal settlements and often fail not because of engineering but because of governance. The authors highlight the need for clear responsibility, along with cleaning and maintenance systems, so that shared toilets remain functional and hygienic rather than becoming points of concentrated exposure. These may sound like mundane management details, but in dense settlements a single poorly maintained shared block serving dozens of households can become an amplifier of transmission during a flood.

The remaining priorities extend from infrastructure to institutions and information. Routine maintenance and supply-chain reliability matter because sanitation systems fail quietly when spare parts, emptying services, and treatment chemicals are unavailable, and floods stress those supply chains at exactly the moment demand peaks. Community-engaged early warning and response is equally critical: residents of informal settlements are the first to know when latrines are flooding or water sources are turning turbid, and systems that channel that knowledge into rapid action, whether pre-emptive sludge emptying, water treatment distribution, or health surveillance, can intervene before contamination becomes an epidemic. Finally, the essay calls for monitoring systems that link service and environmental indicators to health outcomes, so that data on latrine functionality, water quality, and flood extent can feed directly into public health decision-making rather than sitting in separate silos managed by different agencies.

The broader significance of this argument lies in how it reframes the relationship between climate adaptation and infectious disease control. Much of the policy conversation about climate and health focuses on heat, vector-borne disease, and extreme weather mortality, while sanitation is often treated as a development sector with its own separate funding streams and institutions. The essay’s framing collapses that separation: in LMIC cities, a flood-resilient latrine is epidemic preparedness, and a reliable fecal sludge treatment plant is a cholera vaccine of sorts, working continuously and invisibly before any outbreak begins. As rainfall extremes intensify and informal settlements continue to grow, the authors’ message is that the durability of public health in these cities will be decided not only in clinics and laboratories but in the pits, pipes, and shared toilets that determine whether a storm remains a nuisance or becomes the first chapter of an epidemic.

Subject of Research: Flood-driven sanitation failure and cholera risk in urban informal settlements of low- and middle-income countries

Article Title: Flooding-driven sanitation failure and enteric disease risk in urban informal settlements: Cholera as an illustrative case for climate-resilient sanitation in low- and middle-income countries

Article References: Tusabe, F., Lebu, S., & Manga, M. (2026). Flooding-driven sanitation failure and enteric disease risk in urban informal settlements: Cholera as an illustrative case for climate-resilient sanitation in low- and middle-income countries. PLOS Climate, 5(9), e0001082. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001082

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001082

Keywords: cholera, sanitation, flooding, informal settlements, climate resilience, urban health, fecal sludge management, water quality, Lusaka, Zambia, enteric disease, epidemic preparedness

The urgency behind the effort is rooted in one of the defining demographic shifts of the twenty-first century. The United Nations projects that by 2050 nearly 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas, with the fastest growth concentrated in South Asia and Africa. In low- and middle-income countries, unplanned urban expansion routinely outpaces infrastructure, producing informal settlements with unsafe housing, poor sanitation, unreliable water, and exposure to flooding, waste pollution, and contaminated air. These clustered environmental and social risks drive diarrheal disease, mosquito-borne infections, and respiratory illness. Yet the people most exposed, including migrants, the urban poor, women, and ethnic minorities, are often invisible in official records, which means municipal planners cannot target resources to the neighborhoods that need them most.

The technical problem the researchers set out to solve is fragmentation. In many cities, health, education, water, civil registration, and planning data sit in separate departmental databases with no interoperability, inconsistent coding, and incompatible geographic coverage. Routine health information systems such as clinic records and vital registration are typically designed for national or rural contexts and rarely capture the plurality of providers in urban areas or the granularity needed at ward level. Periodic household surveys offer snapshots but are infrequent and often miss slum settlements entirely. The result is that a slum cluster with high child mortality or no safe water can remain hidden inside favorable city-wide averages, and planning an immunization campaign or a new clinic becomes an exercise in guesswork.

The study will proceed in three sequential phases. From March to November 2025, the team will conduct formative research, including stakeholder interviews and a policy review, alongside a household census and social mapping. From November 2025 to June 2026, they will develop the portal itself, integrating, validating, and visualizing the data. From July to December 2026, the focus shifts to implementation, user engagement, capacity strengthening, and embedding the portal into municipal decision-making. Budhanilkantha was purposively selected because its diverse and rapidly changing population, including dense informal settlements and migratory groups, makes it an ideal proving ground, while remaining manageable for intensive fieldwork.

The formative phase begins with approximately twelve key informant interviews with municipal officials from departments spanning health, education, civil registration, disaster management, animal health, agriculture, environment, infrastructure, information technology, and women, children and inclusion. Semi-structured interviews conducted in Nepali will explore existing data sources and workflows, priority health issues, and barriers to data sharing. Transcripts will be analyzed thematically using NVivo, with two researchers independently coding an initial subset and resolving discrepancies through discussion. Alongside the interviews, the team will review municipal plans, health policies, and census reports, and compile an inventory of routine data sources, including the national Health Management Information System, civil registration records, and education databases, as well as non-routine sources such as past surveys and geographic information system layers.

Three interlinked primary data collection activities will then fill the gaps that routine systems leave. First, GIS-based social mapping will engage community members, youth volunteers, and ward officials in delineating ward boundaries and marking health providers, water sources, schools, markets, transport routes, garbage dumps, and flood zones, along with informal settlements and even shops selling meat, tobacco, and liquor, all of which are relevant to environmental and behavioral health risks. Second, a door-to-door household census will enumerate every household in Wards 4 and 7, capturing household composition, assets, mortality, healthcare access, risk behaviors, maternal and child health, immunization, and HPV vaccination coverage among adolescent girls. Anthropometric measurements, including height, weight, body mass index, blood pressure, and mid-upper arm circumference in children under five, will be recorded, with enumerators using tablets running electronic forms such as Open Data Kit for daily uploads to a secure database.

Third, the team will assess all eleven public health facilities serving the two wards, including one public hospital, six health posts, and four basic health service centers. Structured tools will capture infrastructure, service readiness, equipment, logistics, the availability of eighteen tracer drugs, and the qualifications and training of health care providers. Performance will be benchmarked against Nepal’s Minimum Service Standards, a nationally endorsed framework of the Ministry of Health and Population. GPS coordinates of each facility will enable spatial analysis, and facility data will be linked with household census data to reveal mismatches between where people live, what they need, and what services actually exist. Preliminary findings already illustrate the value of this approach: Ward 7 hosts a high density of informal settlers but is served by only one under-resourced clinic.

The technical architecture of the portal rests on common identifiers and geocoding. Each household receives a unique ID, with individual-level IDs nested within it, allowing records to be linked across datasets where consent permits, or linked spatially through shared geographic identifiers where it does not. Routine government data will be standardized and aligned with ward boundaries using a comprehensive data dictionary, and automated pipelines through APIs or periodic batch uploads will refresh the portal monthly or quarterly. Built on the open-source DHIS2 platform enhanced with GIS modules, the portal will feature interactive dashboards, mapping layers for household density, infrastructure, water and sanitation coverage, and health outcomes, hotspot analytics, custom report generation, and role-based access controls to protect privacy. A user-centered design approach, with participatory workshops, prototype testing, and feedback loops involving municipal officials and community representatives, is intended to ensure usability and long-term adoption.

Data security receives careful attention throughout. All datasets will be stored in password-protected systems with access restricted to a designated municipal focal person and authorized team members, with routine quality checks for missing, duplicate, and out-of-range values, and geospatial information that could identify individual households will never be publicly displayed at an identifiable level. Ethical approval was granted by the Nepal Health Research Council and the University of Leeds, and the study is part of the Community-led Responsive and Effective Urban Health System research consortium funded by UK aid through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

The implications extend well beyond two wards in Kathmandu. Because the architecture is built on common identifiers and flexible GIS layers, the framework can be extended to additional wards and municipalities, with indicators tailored to local contexts such as air quality sensors or traffic accident hotspots. The researchers envision future integration of environmental sensors, urban mobility data, and predictive modeling for disease outbreaks, potentially evolving into a community-facing platform with public health alerts and citizen reporting. By demonstrating that participatory mapping, a household census, and facility surveys can be fused with routine administrative data into a living analytical tool, the project offers a proof of concept for equity-focused urban health governance, aligning local action with Sustainable Development Goal 11 on sustainable cities. For the millions of urban residents across low- and middle-income countries whose lives and needs are currently missing from the data, this Nepali pilot suggests that being counted may be the first step toward being served.

Subject of Research: Development of an integrated urban health data portal to strengthen municipal health systems in Nepal

Article Title: Study protocol for developing an integrated urban health data portal to strengthen urban health systems in Nepal

Article References: Kakchapati, S., Sharma, N., Baral, J., Maharjan, S., Mainali, S., Marasini, S., Elsey, H., Lamichhane, B., Karki, S., Bhattarai, A., Sharma, S., Shrestha, G., Karki, S., Ebenso, B., Hicks, J., Dawkins, B., Koirala, B., Dahal, K. P., Lama, A., & Baral, S. C. (2026). Study protocol for developing an integrated urban health data portal to strengthen urban health systems in Nepal. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 200. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00377-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00377-y

Keywords: urban health, data integration, Nepal, GIS, health informatics, household census, informal settlements, health equity, DHIS2, municipal governance, Kathmandu, study protocol

The research team, led by Solomon Tommy of the University of Oklahoma together with colleagues at the University of Lagos, applied a qualitative critical media analysis to a corpus of news reports retrieved from more than 37 Nigerian online news outlets. After removing duplicates and screening for relevance, 17 unique reports from 10 distinct organizations remained for in-depth analysis. The authors are candid about what that small number signifies: the scarcity of slum-focused pandemic coverage itself reflects the under-representation the study set out to examine. Most of the coverage—13 of the 17 stories—appeared in 2020, during the initial outbreak and lockdown phase, and emphasized emergency framing, exposure, risk, and humanitarian need. Coverage of longer-term recovery and adaptation declined sharply in 2021.

The quantitative patterns within the sample are striking. Only one of the seventeen slum-focused pandemic reports centered women, and only two featured women as the dominant voice. Male voices appeared in sixteen reports, while women were quoted in ten and entirely absent in seven. When women were present, they were framed as victims in nine reports and as dependents in ten. Their agency was coded as present in just three reports, limited in eleven, and absent in three. In other words, the discursive space occupied by women was marginal even in stories ostensibly about the communities in which they live.

The study is grounded in three complementary theoretical frameworks. Framing theory, building on Robert Entman’s influential ‘selection and salience’ postulation, holds that media narratives shape public perception by selectively emphasizing certain aspects of reality while obscuring others—a ‘second level’ of agenda setting that concerns not just how much attention an issue receives but the direction of that attention. Feminist perspectives, particularly Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, provide the critical lens for examining how gender, socioeconomic status, and spatial marginalization compound one another. Development media theory, associated with Denis McQuail, serves as the normative benchmark: it prescribes that media should focus attention on developmental concerns and disadvantaged populations, making the Nigerian coverage a case study in the failure of that therapeutic duty.

Three dominant frames emerged from the analysis. The first is the dominance of official and male voices alongside the erasure of women’s narratives. In one representative story about an airline donating food to ‘less-privileged’ residents of Sabo, Makoko and Ajegunle, the only quoted voices belonged to the company and its officials; residents appeared solely as nameless, agency-less beneficiaries, described entirely through the eyes of their benefactors. The researchers, drawing on Teun van Leeuwen’s account of suppression and backgrounding through generalization, note that institutional actors were named and given identity while residents were subsumed under broad categories. Similar dynamics appeared in stories about NGO relief distribution, where organizational representatives determined communities’ needs while inhabitants lost voice and identity in exchange for aid.

The second frame is victimhood and dependency framing. In one BusinessDay report, women described their plight in stark terms: ‘We almost died of hunger; there were no palliatives for us… We are lying down helplessly with no food, no water and no drugs.’ The analysis highlights how passive language and the recurring negation ‘no… no… no…’ present women through a deficit prism, defined by what they lack rather than what they possess. Another Punch HealthWise story on maternal mortality in Makoko, the researchers argue, locates the problem in women’s reproductive bodies rather than in the socio-structural dysfunction—systemic disenfranchisement from healthcare infrastructure, underfunded public services, and spatial segregation—that actually raises the risk of childbirth in these areas. This, they contend, echoes what feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz criticizes as biological essentialism, reducing women’s experience to bodily functions while excising their potential for political and social contribution.

The third frame is the dilution of gendered agency. The rare exception in the dataset, a story in The Cable about fish traders who sustain Lagos’s food supply, portrayed women as economic actors coping and organizing under constrained conditions, describing how they survived the lockdown on diminished earnings. Yet even this outlier, the authors note, attributed women’s exclusion from digital markets to their own ‘lack of education’ rather than to the systemic barriers created by governments and financial institutions—a rhetorical move that shifts blame from powerful actors onto the women themselves. The rarity of such agency-based narratives underscores how peripheral they are within mainstream coverage, where women’s organizing and women-led recovery initiatives are either ignored or treated as one-off curiosities.

The implications of this framing extend well beyond representation. First, the researchers argue, it produces discursive disempowerment and delegitimization: when media fail to platform women or frame them merely as passive aid recipients, they confer legitimacy on institutional actors while eroding recognition of women’s contributions to urban resilience, including the reproductive labor, communal care systems, and informal support infrastructures that sustained families and neighborhoods during and after lockdowns. Second, the constant foregrounding of governments, NGOs, and corporations as rescuers entrenches existing power imbalances, reinforcing what the authors call a self-fulfilling prophecy among marginalized populations about their capacity for self-progress and dampening demand for participatory, locally driven development. Third, repeated dependency frames erode women’s sense of self-deterministic efficacy, normalizing a system in which institutions dispense aid and women receive it.

The study also situates its findings in a global context. Comparable research on Bangladesh’s urban slums found that ‘the documentation of slum-dweller mobilisation and agency remains largely invisible,’ suggesting that the pattern is a Global South-wide phenomenon rather than a uniquely Nigerian one. Scholars cited in the study have shown that women are often depicted in passive victim roles during disasters and health crises while men appear as active leaders, and that such stereotypical framing influences women’s self-perceptions, public perceptions of women’s resilience, and external policy responses. Because media narratives perform an agenda-setting function, skewed coverage can hamper the policy reactions needed to tackle the socio-structural inequalities that sustain the status quo.

The authors conclude with a call for counter-hegemonic framing: women should be recognized as primary narrators of their own experiences, and newsrooms should adopt solutions journalism approaches that causally link vulnerability to structural injustice rather than to gendered deficiencies. With women constituting roughly half of Nigeria’s population, the researchers argue, perpetuating stereotypes that limit their capacity to contribute to positive change amounts to urban injustice. Genuine urban resilience during future pandemics, they contend, demands participatory and inclusive narratives that treat slum-dwelling women not as exemplars of urban decay awaiting rescue, but as essential partners in navigating the crises that cities like Lagos will inevitably face again.

Subject of Research: Media framing of gender, vulnerability and agency among women in Lagos slums during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Title: Media constructions of gendered helplessness and the decentring of women in Lagos slums during the COVID 19 pandemic

Article References: Tommy, S., Ogwezzy-Ndisika, A. O., Faustino, B. A., & Aleshinloye, O. (2026). Media constructions of gendered helplessness and the decentring of women in Lagos slums during the COVID 19 pandemic. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 243. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00578-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00578-1

Keywords: media framing, COVID-19, Lagos slums, gender, women's agency, urban resilience, Nigeria, critical discourse analysis, victimhood framing, informal settlements, feminist media studies, development journalism

The researchers worked in cooperation with the University of Manchester’s African Cities Research Consortium, selecting twelve cities chosen to reflect the continent’s diversity in geography, climate, economy, culture, and urbanisation history. The set includes heavily studied metropolises such as Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos, alongside severely under-researched cities like Bukavu, Freetown, Maiduguri, and Mogadishu. After screening more than 3,100 search results with machine-assisted tools and manual review, the team coded each documented intervention by actor, spatial scale, implementation status, response type, and potential synergies or trade-offs, then contextualised the results against a composite index combining climate exposure, social vulnerability, and infrastructure deficit.

The imbalance between adaptation and mitigation is not accidental, the authors argue, but rooted in the architecture of international climate finance. Mitigation programmes globally receive roughly 30 billion US dollars compared with 16 billion for adaptation and a mere 2.7 billion for integrated strategies. More than half of adaptation programmes, 57 percent, are loan-financed, and disbursement ratios hover around 46 percent. The cost-benefit logic of climate finance privileges measurable emission reductions over the diffuse, context-specific benefits of adaptation, creating what the study calls a paradox: African cities contribute least to global warming, with average per capita emissions of around 2.5 tonnes per year compared with 27 tonnes in cities like Rotterdam, yet the financing system disadvantages precisely those cities for whom adaptation is the urgent imperative.

To quantify where co-beneficial measures might be falling behind, the researchers introduced what they call the Synergy Gap, calculated as the difference between the general implementation rate and the rate at which actions with cross-domain benefits are implemented. Positive values signal that singular interventions are outpacing synergistic ones, a pattern the authors attribute to siloed governance structures that treat adaptation and mitigation as separate policy domains. About 32 percent of all recorded actions carried potential synergies, and the largest share, 51 percent, fell into a category the study labels the NBS-Sequestration Nexus: nature-based solutions such as tree planting, mangrove restoration, and green infrastructure that cool neighbourhoods and buffer floods while also sequestering carbon.

The geography of implementation is strikingly uneven. Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos consistently show the highest levels of reported climate activity and implementation, while Addis Ababa, Freetown, and Mogadishu sit at the lower end. In Addis Ababa, roughly 90 percent of recorded actions consist of plans and recommendations rather than concrete implementations, despite strong problem awareness among city planners regarding drinking water, sewage, and flooding. Accra, together with Lilongwe, shows the largest Synergy Gap in the dataset, with promising policy frameworks on solid waste, energy, and transport undermined by weak cross-sectoral execution. In contrast, Nairobi, Freetown, and Maiduguri are the only three cities where more synergistic actions are implemented than singular ones, driven mainly by local and multi-actor initiatives.

One of the study’s most consequential findings concerns who actually gets things done. Households and communities achieve higher implementation rates than government-led measures across the twelve cities, and multi-actor collaborations also perform comparatively well. Autonomous actions were overwhelmingly coded at the household and community levels, with half of household actions being behavioural or cultural practices such as savings strategies and improved waste handling. Yet these are the least resourced actors in the climate finance landscape. The authors note that this partly reflects a research bias, since studies tend to document community practices only once they are already observable, while government planning is researched regardless of whether it is ever implemented. Still, the pattern underscores a structural tension: the potentially most effective actors are the least funded.

Informal settlements emerge as both the epicentre of climate vulnerability and a blind spot in the evidence base. Actions targeting informal settlements account for 37 percent of the sample, with the highest shares in Nairobi at 77 percent and Lilongwe at 67 percent, but only 3 percent in Addis Ababa despite its slum population share of around 72 percent. The study devotes considerable attention to the conceptual difficulties of informality, noting that the term is a malleable socio-political construct and that formal and informal sectors are so interpenetrated in many African cities that separating them is, as one cited scholar puts it, ridiculous. Data on informality, the largest dimension of most African cities, are rarely publicly available, and urban indicators often aggregate formal and informal dimensions in ways that obscure intra-urban inequality.

Data scarcity itself emerges as a methodological finding. For Bukavu, Freetown, Maiduguri, and Mogadishu, fewer than ten publications per city exist, and the authors caution that the apparent positions of Bukavu and Maiduguri in their comparative analyses very likely reflect data artefacts rather than actual activity levels. Mogadishu, despite facing among the most urgent climate pressures, remains one of the least researched capital cities in Africa, with minimal solar and wind adoption despite favourable conditions. The authors stress that reported action levels are as much a function of research attention as of actual implementation, an epistemic bias they link to the framing of Southern Urbanism, which rejects applying Euro-American urban theory to cities shaped by colonial and postcolonial dynamics.

Trade-off risks, though less frequent than synergies, cluster in worrying ways. Of 268 potential trade-offs recorded, representing 14 percent of all actions, half relate to social exclusion, followed by potential ecosystem harm at 26 percent. The authors warn that when technical and utilitarian values dominate nature-based interventions, the social and cultural dimensions of human-nature relations central to how African communities experience climate risk are marginalised. Excess rainfall is the most frequently recorded climate stressor across half the cities, associated with nearly 60 percent of preventative adaptation goals, while temperature extremes concentrate in Accra, Addis Ababa, and Dar es Salaam.

The study’s conclusions are deliberately framed as hypotheses rather than definitive rankings, given the exploratory nature of comparing cities with such uneven evidence bases. But its prescriptions are clear: integrated, multi-scalar approaches anchored in better data and dynamic frameworks are essential to align urban climate action with Africa’s heterogeneous urban realities. The authors call for flexible, co-produced typologies that can distinguish settlements appearing similar from above but diverging on the ground, dedicated funding windows for community-government coalitions, and governance reforms that overcome the compartmentalisation of adaptation and mitigation. As the scientific community prepares the IPCC’s forthcoming Special Report on Cities, the message from these twelve African cities is that integration is not simply another box to check, but a precondition for climate action that works.

Subject of Research: Integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions, synergies, and co-benefits in African cities

Article Title: Lessons from integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions for synergies and co-benefits in African cities

Article References: Bodenstein, C.-P., & Lwasa, S. (2026). Lessons from integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions for synergies and co-benefits in African cities. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00359-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00359-0

Keywords: climate adaptation, climate mitigation, African cities, synergy gap, co-benefits, nature-based solutions, informal settlements, urban climate finance, Southern Urbanism, climate governance, urban vulnerability, infrastructure deficit

The research, conducted by Godfrey Nkugwa of Wuhan University of Technology, tackles a glaring blind spot in urban climate science. While the Local Climate Zone framework introduced by Stewart and Oke has been widely applied across Europe, Asia and North America through the WUDAPT initiative, standardized LCZ-based analyses in Africa remain strikingly rare. This omission matters because Africa’s urbanization follows a fundamentally different trajectory than that of industrialized regions. Instead of factory-driven growth, East African cities are expanding through what researchers call urbanization without industrialization, fueled by poverty and climate-driven migration, and producing vast informal settlements in the process. More than 70 percent of Dar es Salaam’s inhabitants already live in informal neighborhoods, and Nairobi’s Kibera ranks among the largest slums on the continent.

To capture this distinctive urban fabric, the study introduced a methodological innovation: a validated subclass labeled LCZ 3_(7), which describes compact low-rise morphology built with lightweight informal materials such as corrugated metal, timber and mud. The subclass was defined operationally based on physical surface properties that correlate strongly with known slum boundaries, distinguishing it from the open, single-storey LCZ 7 class by its taller structures and denser layout. Classification accuracy for these informal classes exceeded 0.85 across all three cities and all years, verified through 2,000 randomly sampled points cross-checked against multi-temporal satellite imagery by three independent analysts. The authors caution that this remains a physical proxy rather than a legal designation of informality, but it offers a potentially transferable tool for monitoring vulnerable neighborhoods where tenure data are unavailable.

Using Landsat 8 and 9 imagery acquired in strict dry-season, cloud-free conditions for 2014, 2020 and 2024, the analysis mapped land surface temperature and urban morphology at a uniform 100-meter grid. The results reveal a consistent two-stage trajectory of urban growth across all three cities. Between 2014 and 2020, the metropolises expanded horizontally, converting vegetation and peri-urban land into built fabric at a furious pace. Dar es Salaam was the most aggressive, with its dominant open low-rise class surging from 33.7 percent to 49.0 percent of the built-up area, while its natural tree cover plummeted from 27.2 percent to just 9.0 percent. After 2020, the pattern shifted to spatial consolidation, with class persistence soaring above 85 to 95 percent as cities filled in rather than spread out.

The thermal story is equally dramatic and sharply divergent. Within each city’s seasonal baseline, informal settlement heat island intensity rose over the decade by 1.22 degrees Celsius in Kampala, 2.48 degrees in Dar es Salaam and 3.65 degrees in Nairobi, making Nairobi the most rapidly warming informal environment in the region. By 2024, Nairobi’s LCZ 7 class recorded an absolute heat island intensity of 6.35 degrees Celsius, the highest of any informal class across all three cities. What was previously considered a case of thermal stabilization has now been revealed as a strong warming regime, concentrated precisely in the densifying settlements where the region’s most vulnerable populations live.

Beneath these headline numbers lies a more subtle discovery: a regime shift in the drivers of urban heat. During the expansion phase, two-dimensional impervious cover, measured by the normalized difference impervious surface index, dominated warming across all cities. But after 2020, in the inland capitals of Nairobi and Kampala, three-dimensional building density captured by the normalized difference bareness and building index overtook imperviousness as the primary predictor. This structural transition signals that once the urban footprint is established, the vertical packing of compact low-rise structures becomes the dominant locus of heat retention, effectively locking heat exposure into the morphology of consolidated informal settlements, a legacy effect that is notoriously difficult to retrofit.

Geographically weighted regression, which models how driver relationships vary across space, exposed mechanisms invisible to global statistics. In Kampala, the coefficient for surface moisture reversed sign in dense informal areas between 2020 and 2024, suggesting that water in these neighborhoods no longer provides evaporative cooling but instead marks stagnant moisture trapped within narrow canyons of corrugated metal, creating hyperlocal heat traps. In Nairobi, nighttime lights and building density spatially decoupled after 2020, revealing that the most severe thermal hotspots form precisely where unlit, consolidated low-rise housing blocks intersect with brightly lit commercial corridors, a convergence of poverty and economic activity that defines a specific urban form for targeted intervention. In coastal Dar es Salaam, by contrast, surface albedo delivers measurable cooling only near the shoreline, where sea breezes amplify heat advection, while impervious cover retains primacy inland, suggesting coastal ventilation partially offsets densification-driven warming.

Hotspot analysis using the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic confirmed these shifting geographies of risk. Nairobi’s heat exposure originated in peripheral transitional scrublands during the expansion phase but by 2024 had concentrated firmly within densifying informal settlements. Kampala’s hotspots decayed from intense clusters in compact cores to diffuse patterns, while Dar es Salaam’s persisted in compact low-rise districts with emerging informal heat exposure. The cooling capacity of natural and water-covered zones weakened across the board, from wetlands in Dar es Salaam to vegetated sinks in Kampala, signaling that encroachment on blue and green spaces is eroding the region’s natural thermal defenses.

These divergent trajectories argue forcefully against one-size-fits-all mitigation prescriptions. For Kampala and Dar es Salaam, where the combination of high building density and lightweight materials drives heat amplification, the study points to cool-roof retrofits, transitioning from corrugated metal to high-albedo reflective materials, alongside protection of remaining blue spaces and managed pervious drainage to restore evaporative cooling. Empirical support exists: white roof coatings applied across 11,000 square meters of roofing in Nairobi’s informal settlements and cool-roof paint trials in rural Sub-Saharan Africa have both demonstrated measurable indoor temperature reductions. For Nairobi, the priority is different: surgical, targeted green infrastructure such as pocket parks, green courtyards and strategic street trees at the identified intersection points of dense informal housing and commercial activity, since blanket city-wide greening would be far less effective.

The study’s limitations are candidly acknowledged, including single-date thermal snapshots per year, the absence of in-situ validation, and the fact that biophysical heat exposure rather than socioeconomic vulnerability was assessed. Even so, the validated LCZ framework and its novel informal subclass offer a standardized baseline for tracking thermal equity across data-scarce, rapidly urbanizing regions. As East African cities continue their transition from horizontal expansion to consolidation, the research delivers a clear warning: heat exposure in informal settlements is not homogeneous but is produced by geographically specific intersections of land cover, building density, economic activity and coastal or inland climate. Meeting it will require exactly the kind of context-sensitive, spatially explicit intelligence this study now provides.

Subject of Research: Multi-temporal Local Climate Zone analysis of surface urban heat island drivers in East African informal settlements

Article Title: Socio-spatial drivers of thermal environment evolution in East African informal settlements based on multi-temporal LCZ analysis of major metropolises

Article References: Socio-spatial drivers of thermal environment evolution in East African informal settlements based on multi-temporal LCZ analysis of major metropolises. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00366-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00366-1

Keywords: local climate zones, surface urban heat island, informal settlements, East Africa, remote sensing, land surface temperature, Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, urban heat, climate adaptation, geographically weighted regression

The core finding is stark: the frequency of hydrometeorological extremes in African cities is rising, driven by the combined forces of climate change and rapid, often unplanned urbanization. Climate change is intensifying the water cycle, producing heavier downpours when rain arrives and longer, hotter dry spells when it does not. At the same time, African cities are among the fastest growing in the world, with populations expanding into floodplains, wetlands and steep slopes that were once avoided precisely because of their vulnerability. The result is a dangerous collision between more frequent hazards and more people and assets placed directly in harm’s way.

From a technical standpoint, the mechanisms behind this escalation are well understood. Warmer atmospheric temperatures allow the air to hold more moisture, following the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, which means that when convective storms trigger, they can release substantially more rainfall in shorter periods. In tropical and subtropical African cities, much of the annual precipitation falls in intense convective events, so this thermodynamic amplification translates directly into flash flood risk. Conversely, shifting rainfall regimes and rising evaporative demand extend dry seasons, deplete reservoirs and stress groundwater systems, deepening drought conditions that cascade into food and water insecurity for urban populations dependent on fragile supply chains.

Urbanization compounds these climatic drivers in ways that are particularly severe in African contexts. Impermeable surfaces, informal settlements with inadequate drainage, and the loss of natural buffers such as wetlands and urban forests all reduce the capacity of city landscapes to absorb and convey water. Many African cities rely on drainage infrastructure designed decades ago, or never designed at all, for rainfall intensities that are now routinely exceeded. When extreme rain falls on such landscapes, runoff concentrates quickly, overwhelms channels and inundates low-lying neighborhoods, which are disproportionately occupied by low-income households with limited capacity to prepare, respond or recover.

The research emphasizes that the impacts are deeply unequal. Informal settlements, which house a large and growing share of urban Africans, typically lack formal drainage, secure tenure, insurance and reliable early warning. Residents of these areas face recurring property loss, waterborne disease outbreaks following floods, and chronic water scarcity during droughts. Women, children, the elderly and those working in the informal economy bear a disproportionate share of the burden. The study stresses that hydrometeorological extremes are therefore not only a physical science problem but a question of social justice, and that adaptation policies which ignore this distributional reality risk reinforcing the very vulnerabilities they aim to reduce.

Despite the escalating risk, the authors find that adaptation in African cities remains fragmented, underfunded and often reactive. Responses tend to follow disasters rather than anticipate them, with resources mobilized after lives have already been lost. Formal adaptation planning exists in many countries, frequently in the form of National Adaptation Plans submitted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but implementation at the city scale lags far behind. Municipal governments, which are on the front line of flood defense, drainage maintenance and emergency response, often lack the technical capacity, data, mandates and budgets to translate national commitments into local action.

A central argument of the paper is that effective adaptation must be grounded in better information. Many African cities operate with sparse hydrological and meteorological observation networks, short historical records and limited downscaled climate projections, making it difficult to quantify risk or design infrastructure to appropriate standards. The authors call for expanded investment in observation systems, early warning services and open climate data, alongside the use of modern modeling tools that can capture the small-scale convective storms and urban flooding processes most relevant to city decision-makers. Improved risk mapping, they argue, is a prerequisite for prioritizing investments and protecting the most exposed communities first.

The study also highlights the potential of combining engineered and nature-based solutions. Upgraded drainage, flood barriers and resilient water supply systems remain essential, but restoring wetlands, protecting urban green space, adopting permeable surfaces and implementing sustainable urban drainage can reduce flood peaks, cool overheated neighborhoods and recharge aquifers simultaneously. Such approaches are often cheaper to maintain than hard infrastructure and deliver co-benefits for health, biodiversity and livelihoods. Equally important, the authors point to the value of integrating local and indigenous knowledge with scientific assessment, and of involving residents of informal settlements directly in the design and governance of adaptation measures, since community-led initiatives have repeatedly proven more durable than top-down interventions.

Finance emerges as a persistent bottleneck. African cities receive only a small fraction of global climate finance, and what does arrive is often channeled through national governments with limited reach to municipal level. The paper argues that closing the adaptation gap will require new funding mechanisms that flow directly to cities, support for municipal creditworthiness, and blending of public, private and international resources. It also warns that the cost of inaction is rising: every year without effective adaptation increases future losses, damages and displacement, making delayed investment far more expensive than timely prevention.

Ultimately, the research delivers both a warning and a roadmap. The warning is that hydrometeorological extremes will continue to intensify across African cities, threatening lives, livelihoods and hard-won development gains if current trajectories persist. The roadmap is a comprehensive adaptation agenda: invest in data and early warning, upgrade and diversify infrastructure, embrace nature-based solutions, embed equity in planning, strengthen municipal institutions and unlock sustained finance. The authors conclude that with decisive action, African cities can transform mounting climate risk into an opportunity to build safer, fairer and more sustainable urban futures, but that this transformation must begin now, before the next extreme arrives.

Subject of Research: Rising hydrometeorological extremes in African cities and the need for effective urban climate adaptation

Article Title: Growing occurrence of hydrometeorological extremes in African cities and the urge for effective adaptation

Article References: Salhi, A., Pérez-Cutillas, P., & Heggy, E. (2026). Growing occurrence of hydrometeorological extremes in African cities and the urge for effective adaptation. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00475-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s42949-026-00475-1

Keywords: hydrometeorological extremes, African cities, urban flooding, drought, climate adaptation, urbanization, informal settlements, early warning systems, nature-based solutions, climate finance, urban sustainability, Growing