COP29 focused on making cities sustainable but overlooked concerns of a key group – the urban poor

They are immensely vulnerable to climate change, but the ground-level problems of the urban poor did not find much space at the conference.

COP29 focused on making cities sustainable but overlooked concerns of a key group – the urban poor

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When Mumbai-based climate advocate Dulari Parmar attended the COP29 climate conference in Baku in Azerbaijan last month, she was struck by the lack of conversation about urban poverty.

This was despite the fact that cities, which house more than half the world’s population, were in the spotlight at this year’s summit. That isn’t suprising, considering that a 2023 World Bank report found that urban areas generate 70% of global greenhouse emissions. Strategies to tackle them will be key to containing climate change/

However, Parmar said that the sessions she attended overlooked a key question: how to help the poorest residents of cities. “There are a lot of elite groups that are talking about climate action,” she said. “But it’s the poor and the youth from these communities who are actually impacted and do not have access to resources.”

At the conference, Parmar spoke about the Mitigation Work Programme, a process established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to aid countries in their efforts to tackle climate change.

The previous month, at another event, the United Nations had released a set of recommendations pertaining to this programme. But, Parmar noted, none of these addressed the specific needs of the urban poor. In fact, documentation from the event did not mention poverty...

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