HEATENGAGE is a part of the project entitled: “(Mal) Adaptation to extreme urban heat: At what cost, to whom?” funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS, 2023-2027. In this project, we examine how inequality interacts with adaptation responses to extreme urban heat and strive to address the following questions:

• How are benefits and costs of adaptation policies distributed across social groups?
• What are the causes of adaptation gaps and maladaptation responses?
• What institutional settings are required to ensure inclusive adaptation responses to extreme urban heat?

A background to the project:

Cities are hotspots for the impacts of extreme heat where people who are vulnerable (in terms of age, gender, health condition, and occupation), or belong to ethnic minorities or low-income households (with limited access to information, shelter, water, and green spaces) are harder hit than others. In response, city planners around the world have increasingly adopted various adaptation strategies to enhance citizens’ coping capacities, for example, by using digital technologies in early warning systems, increasing green spaces to provide shade and reduce ambient air temperature, and improving access to water, sanitation, and health care.

Nevertheless, the IPCC 6th Assessment Report 2022 reveals that despite the progress, there is still a substantial mismatch between intended goals and outcomes of adaptation strategies including lock-ins of vulnerability that are costly and difficult to change and may lead to maladaptation and increasing inequality. More worrying is the lack of adaptation strategies or lack of registered reports of heatwave events in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which are projected to become unbearably hotter in the future. This, coupled with urban population growth, uneven urban development, unequal access to health facilities and inefficient institutions for the non-elites, will potentially put the wellbeing of billions of people at increased risk by the end of the century.

In light of these concerns, this project aims to examine how inequality interacts with adaptation responses to extreme urban heat and to identify the institutional conditions required for building socially sound and climate-resilient cities. We employ a relational approach, drawing on empirical evidence in Accra, Ghana. Located in a climatically vulnerable region, the city shares features of many metropolises in the global South, where sweltering heat is intertwined with mounting inequality, growing urban population, and uneven development. By using a mixed-methods approach, we integrate quantitative techniques and qualitative methods to collect and analyze data on how the benefits or costs of adaptation policy responses are distributed among different social groups.

The project findings fill the following knowledge gaps: First, it addresses the urgent call for research regarding the impacts of heatwaves and related adaptation responses in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, it will systematically map out the adaptation gaps and maladaptation practices linked with various socio-economic factors. Third, it develops an analytical framework to provide robust explanations of causes of uneven impacts of adaptation responses, essential for formulating inclusive adaptation policies and practices.