Author: Barbara Summers
How can we transform research and practice so that the lived experience and voices of communities and children in informal settlements can shape global climate resilience conversations? This blog explains how we did it in the waterfront settlements of Port Harcourt.
Life in Port Harcourt’s waterfront settlements
Port Harcourt is the largest city in the Niger Delta and Nigeria’s oil capital. Here dense informal settlements known locally as waterfront communities are home to nearly half a million residents who live on reclaimed mangrove land without access to basic infrastructure.
These neighbourhoods face frequent flooding, heat stress, and pollution from the oil industry. For years, they have been labelled as “illegal” and excluded from city planning. Even as their residents, many of them children, experience the harshest effects of climate change.
Changing the narrative through community-led research
At the Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform (CMAP) and Chicoco Collective, we work with residents to drive the narrative of their settlements. Our participatory mapping program, Chicoco Maps, is led by youth and community researchers who live in these same neighbourhoods. They use digital tools, storytelling, and collective mapping to document land use, environmental hazards, and community priorities.
We grounded research for the brief Children, Climate Change and Slums in a simple principle: research about informal settlements should be led by people who live in them. Co-authoring with youth from the Chicoco Maps team, we paired global evidence with focus groups in Port Harcourt’s waterfronts to root the work in lived experience. Our goal was to bridge the gap between research and reality, connecting global discussions on climate and children’s rights with what’s happening on the ground.
Children reframing resilience: Lessons from Port Harcourt’s waterfronts
To capture these experiences, we held six focus groups with over 50 participants, including 34 children living in waterfront communities. Their insights transformed abstract data into lived realities.
Although our past work at CMAP and Chicoco has long included stories told about or through children’s perspectives, through radio, film, and photography, this was the first time we conducted structured research with children.
It challenged us, both in process and in perspective. Many of the children were initially quiet and reserved, unaccustomed to being asked their views on flooding, waste, or heat, subjects that adults typically discuss around them, not with them.
But as the sessions unfolded, something shifted. Children warmed up, they became eager and expressive, bringing up not just what affected them personally, but how these same issues shaped the well-being of their families and communities. They spoke about parents being unable to get to work when it floods, younger siblings falling ill during heatwaves, heavy rain causing their roof to collapse, the impact on their household’s access to food and clean water and even how extreme temperatures affect the mood of their teachers and families.
What began as a research exercise became a collective reflection, a space where children connected their own experiences to broader community resilience. It reminded us that children do not view climate change in isolation: for them, every impact links to family, friendship, and daily survival.
This process also challenged our assumptions about what “community-led” really means. Simply working with communities is not enough, it does not automatically shift power or address existing inequities. We were reminded that communities, like governments, contain complex power dynamics. Certain voices often dominate, while others, especially those of children, young women, or people living on the margins, are left out.
Without conscious effort, even participatory projects risk reproducing the same hierarchies they aim to dismantle. For us, working with children on this research reaffirmed the need to continually question who is being heard, who is being left out, and how we design truly inclusive spaces for dialogue.
It taught us that building climate resilience is not just about infrastructure or adaptation, it is about shifting power, both within communities and beyond them.
Inspiring Parallels
There are other examples of how communities are reimagining resilience by shifting who holds power.
- In Accra, Ghana, the youth-led Kyɛnsu Community Water Share Kiosk ensures access to clean water in informal settlements while placing women and girls, those most affected by scarcity, at the centre of decision-making.
- In Nairobi, Kenya, the Future Yetu initiative by Hope Raisers mobilises young people to co-create a community climate manifesto and build child-friendly “pocket parks” that link neighbourhood activism to city planning.
- And in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Favela Climate Memory integrates the environmental histories and activism of favelas into schools, showing children that their communities are sites of knowledge and resilience.
Together, these initiatives, and our own experience in Port Harcourt, reveal a common truth: children and youth are not passive victims of climate change, but active agents of transformation, reshaping their cities and redefining what urban adaptation looks like from the bottom up.
The Overlooked Intersection: Children, Climate, and Slums
Today, approximately 500 million children live in slums , facing daily exposure to extreme heat, flooding, pollution and unsafe living conditions. By 2050, that number could rise to 1.5 billion, with many children living in settlements up to 2°C hotter than global averages.[1]
Children under five are among the most vulnerable. They face unsafe housing, contaminated water, overcrowded and unregulated informal childcare, and health impacts from heat stress and disease. Caregivers shoulder the emotional and physical burden of protecting them, often in homes without cooling, clean water, or safe sanitation.
Girls are particularly affected, frequently taking on greater caregiving roles and facing higher risks of school dropout and early marriage.
Yet these children and their caregivers remain largely invisible in climate planning. Informal settlements are often unrecognised by local governments, leaving residents without representation, services, or protection.
As our recent brief, Children, Climate Change, and Slums, highlights, climate change deepens existing inequalities and reshapes childhood itself, but it also reveals children’s resilience, creativity, and capacity for change.
As urban planners and community researchers in Port Harcourt, we see how this invisibility extends beyond statistics, shaping how entire neighbourhoods and their residents are left out of adaptation decisions.
Looking Ahead
At COP30 and other global climate events, we must centre communities like Port Harcourt’s waterfronts in global climate conversations. Children and caregivers already know what resilience means, and they are a valuable yet overlooked resource in climate action and in upgrading informal settlements.
At CMAP and Chicoco Collective, we believe the future of climate-resilient cities depends on shifting power: from policy made about communities to knowledge generated by them, and from listening to the loudest voices to making space for those too often unheard. Only then can adaptation truly reflect the lived realities of those most affected.
What can governments, NGOs, urban practitioners and local communities do to improve child-centred climate resilience in urban informal settlements?
Read the full brief to learn how we can build fairer, child-centred cities and follow Chicoco Collective’s work on participatory mapping and community-led planning in climate justice.
Here are some thoughts on what should happen next:
- Prioritise young children and caregivers. Most programmes focus on older youth. Interventions must include children under five and their caregivers.
- Build evidence grounded in informal settlements. Existing tools reflect Global North contexts. We need data and research grounded in dense, low-income urban areas informing tools and guidance.
- Look beyond disasters. Floods matter, but daily stresses like heat, water scarcity and poor air quality that define children’s lives and must be addressed.
- Gather better data. Collect age- and gender-disaggregated data to make young children, girls, and mothers visible in climate planning.
- Embed children’s rights and voices. Consult children and caregivers in adaptation and upgrading plans as equal partners, not as an afterthought.
- Recognise children as climate actors. Children are already caring for siblings, tending plants, and observing environmental change. Supporting their knowledge and creativity strengthens community resilience.
- Expand local climate education and awareness. Adapt climate-education tools to reflect local environments and urban realities — from tidal flooding and mangroves to heat trapped in dense settlements — so children, caregivers and community leaders understand risks in their own context and can act on them.
How organisations can act now:
- Create forums for children and caregivers to shape local climate priorities.
- Integrate climate education into schools, early-childhood centres, and community media.
- Develop neighbourhood-specific climate awareness tools (e.g., heat safety guides for informal settlements, community weather monitoring, locally relevant storytelling).
- Support community-based research led by youth and caregivers.
- Co-design heat-resilient housing, schools, and childcare spaces.
- Fund child- and caregiver-focused health, water, and nutrition programmes.
- Ensure local governments hear directly from families in informal settlements.
Endnote
[1] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2023) The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023: Special Edition – July 2023. https://bit.ly/4j4PJyf
About the Author
Barbara Summers is the Director of Spatial Research and Strategies at Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform (CMAP) and co-author of Children, Climate Change, and Slums. Thanks to Dr Sheridan Bartlett for reviewing an earlier version of this blog and providing valuable feedback.
The Ideas for Action Series showcases ideas for action, innovation, programmes, policies and practices that make public spaces child-friendly. Read more of our blogs here.
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