University-Community Collaboration for Climate Justice Education and Organizing: Partnerships in Canada, Brazil, and Africa

In the coming decades, countries around the world will face increasingly severe challenges related to global climate change. While the details vary from country to country, the impacts will be especially grave for marginalized people, whose access to food, potable water, and safe shelter may be threatened due to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature and to disasters related to extreme weather events. International strategies for addressing climate change are in disarray. The complicated financial and carbon-trading mechanisms promoted by the United Nations and other global institutions are far too bureaucratic, weak, internally inconsistent, and scattered to represent meaningful solutions to climate change. Already the housing, health, and livelihoods of marginalized people worldwide are being threatened by the ramifications of climate change. This means that the marginalized in every community, by definition, have expertise in how priorities should be set to address climate change. Their experiences, knowledge, and views must be part of local, regional, national, and international governance—including urban planning and housing, water management, agriculture, health, and finance policies.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

A Never-Ending Story or the Beginning of the End? A Qualitative Analysis of Perspectives on Climate Change Induced Migration

Climate change induced migration is sometimes pictured as an urgent up-coming crisis that could result in waves of international refugees and violent conflicts, and sometimes as part of human history. It is a contested topic, an issue that divides actors and that still has no agreed upon definition. To get a better understanding of the debate, this thesis sets out to display the main discussions and perspectives on climate change induced migration and to elaborate on the implications that different policy proposals might bring. Through a literature review, main debates and perspectives are identified resulting in the choice of two contesting perspectives to analyse, the climate migrant and the climate refugee perspectives. By analysing the perspectives on a case of climate change induced migration, Bangladesh, debates regarding different types of migration as well as the causes of the phenomenon are elaborated and the implications regarding policy recommendations following the approach of one perspective or the other discussed, bringing theory and reality together. The analysis explores the complex nature of climate change induced migration. It is found that the different perspectives focus on different aspects of the phenomenon, including contesting views on causes and effects. Gaps in both perspectives’ policy recommendations are found and it is argued that there is a need for an approach that recognises the needs of the people affected, but that is also adapted to the current context of international climate change politics

HIV and young people: perceptions of risk, resilience and dignity in an urban slum

Young people are at the centre of the HIV pandemic. Although global incidence of HIV is diminishing, for many cohorts below the age of 24, such as slum-dwelling youth, prevalence has, overall, plateaued or increased. HIV in eastern and southern Africa, the region hit hardest by the disease, is becoming an urban phenomenon and aggregating in informal slum settings. A new genre of research is called for that provides insight into the urban evolution of HIV and identifies entry points for tackling root causes of risk and vulnerability. This is a novel piece of research carried out in two urban slums in Nairobi, Kenya: Korogocho and Majengo. Each site was politically marginalised and inhabited mostly by young people facing a generalised HIV epidemic. In contrast to the predominant quantitative research tradition in Kenya, this is a qualitative study that seeks to understand perceptions of HIV and the processes involved in managing risk from the point of view of young people. A constructivist grounded theory methodology was adopted given its fit with the study’s theoretical conception and topic of inquiry. Two methods were used to generate primary data: first, 25 semi-structured interviews with men and women aged 18–24 years; and second, a photovoice exercise involving nine participants. During interviewing and photovoice, rich data emerged that were sorted into a progression of open, focussed and theoretical codes. The simultaneous process of data generation and analysis pointed to where the research needed to go next and formed an integral part of constructing social theory. An inductive coding approach gradually created a higher conceptual order moving from descriptive to explanatory in which core properties, dimensions and relationships pertaining to the slum universe were captured and synthesised. Through creating a storyline, participants' experiential approach to life was brought into sharp focus as was the role of individual agency and purpose. Research conclusions were interrogated within the domains of individual, environmental and structural determinants and checked against the literature to establish the principle of knowledge generation and translation. The study constructs a theoretical model, 'HIV and the Integrity of Risk —Dignifying Resilience in Disadvantage,' which accounts for young people’s action driven by the exigencies of survival and in which HIV forms part of the compendium of a life lived on the edge. Risk, as this study finds, is about the integrity to perceive advantage in the daily struggle to find sustenance, to take life on with all its pitfalls and gain resilience within the social realm capable of managing processes at the heart of HIV. This research calls for further inquiry that explores measures taken by young slum dwellers to dignify their lives and avoid episodes of humiliation and the impact these have on the social epidemiology of HIV. As a means of helping to control the epidemic, HIV research must continue to prioritise innovative people-centred slum-based social inquiry that highlights what matters most to the people most at risk and the people holding the key to ending AIDS

Integrating openstreetmap data and sentinel-2 Imagery for classifying and monitoring informal settlements

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe identification and monitoring of informal settlements in urban areas is an important step in developing and implementing pro-poor urban policies. Understanding when, where and who lives inside informal settlements is critical to efforts to improve their resilience. This study aims at integrating OSM data and sentinel-2 imagery for classifying and monitoring the growth of informal settlements methods to map informal areas in Kampala (Uganda) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and to monitor their growth in Kampala. Three building feature characteristics of size, shape and Distance to nearest Neighbour were derived and used to cluster and classify informal areas using Hotspot Cluster analysis and ML approach on OSM buildings data. The resultant informal regions in Kampala were used with Sentinel-2 image tiles to investigate the spatiotemporal changes in informal areas using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Results from Optimized Hot Spot Analysis and Random Forest Classification show that Informal regions can be mapped based on building outline characteristics. An accuracy of 90.3% was achieved when an optimally trained CNN was executed on a test set of 2019 satellite image tiles. Predictions of informality from new datasets for the years 2016 and 2017 provided promising results on combining different open source geospatial datasets to identify, classify and monitor informal settlements

Green social work and its implications for social development in China

Green social work has been significant in introducing new issues into environmental debates and increasing its centrality to social work practice. These have included: the mainstreaming of environmental considerations; a widening of the theoretical and practice base to ensure that social and environmental justice are considered integral to any environmental involvement by social workers; highlighting the need to think of innovative approaches to socio-economic development; and making disaster interventions core elements in the social work repertoire of knowledge, skills, capacity building and curriculum formulation. This paper considers the challenges of China’s rapid industrialisation and its implications for rural people migrating into cities, the urban populations that receive them and environmental degradation. It introduces the idea of green social work and discusses the implications of green social work for social development in China in the context of environmental crises precipitated by the country’s rapid economic development