Supporting liveable climate sensitive cities through integrated urban land management

In January 2025 I flew to Jakarta and was struck by the seemingly endless spread of the city while enjoying the bird’s eye view – with mass skyscrapers stretching well beyond my little plane window. This glimpse of Jakarta from above gave credence to statistics from the World Bank that between 1980 and 2002, almost one-quarter of the land area of Jakarta was converted from non-urban uses (e.g. agriculture, wetlands) to urban uses for industry, commerce and housing.

About a year and a bit before I had also visited Dhaka, Bangladesh, where unrelenting traffic jams was just one testament to the rapid population growth taking place in that city. My experience in Dhaka was far from unusual – estimates suggest that Dhaka’s residents spend 3-5 hours a day stuck in traffic jams. 56 percent of Bangladesh’s population is expected to be living in urban areas by 2050 – an incredible transformation given that in 1960 just 5 percent of the population lived in urban areas.

Closer to Australia, nearly one-quarter of Pacific Islanders live in urban areas, by 2030 this urbanisation level is projected to increase to a third of the region’s population. In the Pacific most residents are young (less than 23 years old) – and dominate urban landscapes in what has been described as a ‘youth bulge’. Urban data from Vanuatu shows that one-third of the country’s population is now urban – having reached these level 10 years earlier than official projections.

City skyline in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo by MD Sifat Jahan on Unsplash.

Rapid urbanization, is, of course, not unique to the Asia-Pacific region. Sub-Saharan Africa is witnessing an unparalleled growth of its cities. Over the next three decades, Africa’s urban population will double, increasing from 700 million to 1.4 billion by 2050, making it the continent with the second largest urban population after Asia.

By 2050, it is projected that almost 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities, up from 55 percent today. But these statistics provide only a snapshot of the increasing urban reality of daily life around the globe. Perhaps more interesting is the reasons behind these changes. A quick search reveals that for most of human history, humans have usually lived in smaller settlements. In fact, the UN estimates that it was only in 2007 that urban areas overtook the number of people living in rural settings globally. Natural population increase is the leading growth factor of cities, closely followed by rural-migration.

Personally, I have always loved big cities. Having lived in Nairobi, Sydney and London, for me, cities hold the promise of housing, cosmopolitanism, diversity and opportunities. In this way, it often feels that the pull of cities is inexorable – with people attracted to the services, jobs and independence that cities hold for them vis-à-vis rural areas.

At the same time, the push towards cities is not just bright lights and opportunities. Some (read many) people come to cities not by choice but also due to forced displacement – whether from civil wars, increasingly harsh climate realities in rural areas and the acquisition or forced sale of rural land due to poverty. In regard to conflict, a World Bank blog of 2018 reports that globally, over 70 million people had fled their homes from conflict or persecution either as refugees, internally displaced persons, or asylum seekers. Contrary to the media-fuelled assumption that most of these people live in camps, it is estimated that about 60–80 percent of the world’s forcibly displaced population live in urban areas.

Urbanization in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Cities are reported as engines of economic growth and development by the World Bank – they are the centres where most GDP is generated and most private sector jobs are created.  As cities grow, they help entire regions and even countries to become more prosperous and productive. There are even studies that show that women and girls have more access to education and freedoms in cities.

As part of a World Bank consultancy, I recently supported the drafting of a report focusing on urbanisation in Ethiopia with my LEI colleague Tony Burns – Integrated Urban Land Management for Climate Sensitive Cities: Constraints, Opportunities and Lessons from Ethiopia (June 2025). Drawing largely on Ethiopia’s urban challenges and prospects, but also highlighting Ethiopia’s relevance for urban challenges elsewhere, the report highlighted that the unmatched growth of global cities in many cases has not always produced positive impacts. This is largely because many modern cities have grown spontaneously, without planning and controls, or with local governments who do have the de jure controls, but who lack adequate enforcement mechanisms and power to enforce rules around city growth.

Urbanization was a theme embedded throughout the COP30 agenda, with a dedicated Cities & Regions Hub and several Ministerial meetings on Urbanization. For the first time at a COP, leaders acknowledge that upgrading informal settlements and improving basic services are core components of climate resilience and adaptation.

Indeed, in many cases, the growth of cities has come at the expense of biodiversity, the protection of environmentally sensitive areas and air quality. According to IUCN, by 2030, as city borders continue to expand, it is estimated that cities will expand to cover an additional 290,000 km² of natural habitat, especially in the tropical forests of Africa and Asia, which are amongst the most biodiverse places on Earth. The overwhelming impact of these changes has been a negative impact on biodiversity and deforestation, which in turn threatens functioning ecosystems and the benefits that ecosystems provide to the population.¹¹ Alongside worsening air quality, increased pollution and the stresses associated with urban traffic, unplanned urban sprawl has also resulted in a higher risk of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in populations in city areas.

A major challenge facing cities today is the proliferation of informal and unplanned settlements, particularly in peripheral areas of cities, frequently the only affordable option for migratory and forcibly displaced groups. These zones often lack adequate infrastructure, access to labour markets, and in some cases, proximity to urban services.

While slums are often associated with peripheral areas due to lower land costs and less stringent building regulations in city borders, they also exist within the heart of cities, especially in older urban areas where housing conditions may have deteriorated over time, but which heighten access to jobs and job sites. These city centre slums face similar challenges to peripheral settlements, including issues related to housing quality and access to amenities such as clean water and electricity. Anyone who has been to Kibera, in Nairobi during the twice-yearly rainy seasons recognises immediately the impact of bad weather on living conditions and health in that area. The river regularly overflows with fast-moving floods, turning narrow alleys turn into mud pits filled with sewage and other rubbish, inevitably destroying homes and claiming lives.

In all cases unplanned settlements tend to experience heightened exposure to climate risk and vulnerability due to the use of poor-quality construction materials, as well as encroachment into wetlands, flood runoff and other hazard-prone areas. For this reason, cities in low-income countries face the highest exposure to projected climate change-related hazards and are less resilient to climate-related shocks and stresses.^[1] Simply put, residents of cities in some parts of the world are at a bigger risk of heat stress, earthquakes, mudslides, flooding and sea rises, and the impacts of such events on the poor are far more catastrophic than elsewhere. In the 2010 Haiti earthquake, in Port-au-Prince, poor and densely packed shantytowns and poorly-constructed buildings resulted in far more significant devastation than earthquakes of similar seismic activity in cities where building codes are enforced.

Separate to climate impacts, it has been argued that urbanization processes in Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, have lost most of the benefits that should accrue, with African cities characterized by “urbanization without growth, and urbanization of worsening poverty”, which, in turn is linked to growing inequality, homelessness, overcrowdings, illegality of different types and social exclusions.

Given LEI’s specialised focus on land administration, the recent Ethiopia consultancy and my own research spurred me to examine more explicitly the linkages between land administration and urban planning in addressing the multifarious challenges associated with rapid urban growth that we are witnessing today.

Informal settlements in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2016. 

Ethiopia Key Takeaways

To keep this blog short, I have summarised five takeaways of this research supporting integrated urban land management, which includes references to some of the findings from the World Bank Ethiopia study:

According to some studies, urban centres in developing countries are unordered, unplanned, and disorganized mainly because of either poorly drafted or poor implementation of structure plans (urban planning documents guiding development, land use, infrastructure and growth) of the urban centres^[2] and municipal plans. For want of human and financial resources and political commitment, lack of proper legal frameworks for implementation, planning documents are more like ideal visions rather than a realistic and pragmatic description of how cities can transform under current conditions. Existing formal urban planning standards and regulations are outdated and inappropriate to meet the needs of many cities. As a result, low-income urban households have bypassed the inhibitive official urban planning standards and adopt parallel indigenous structures, procedures and institutions to tackle their key concerns – which centre around the provision of shelter/affordable housing.

The problem is circular because in many cases, land rights cannot be regularised and registered when the building does not comply with planning standards (i.e. land use standards or construction requirements). Moving to the world of pragmatism, regularisation of informal settlements can only happen when land registration processes loosen their requirements that land has been developed in compliance with rigid urban plans – including rules about maximum density, maximum plot sizes, and distance to roads etc. Until then, land administration systems will not reflect the de facto situation of legitimate land ownership and use rights on the ground. But in a circular logic, data on land use and land ownership is crucial for improved city planning and understanding urban growth trends – such as where to build roads, schools and electricity substations. An up-to-date and accurate cadastre gives city and municipal governments a sense of where city growth is taking place, supporting projections about future growth patterns, which in turn ensures more realistic urban planning.

In simple terms – the rules around compliance with planning need to be relaxed, to allow for registration, which in turn, once collected, will allow for better planning data. Related (sorry this is a long point), new laws may also need to be introduced to provide for tolerance limits for discrepancies in land records demonstrating rights to land, to simplify procedures, and to clarify the conversion of rural land rights to urban ones. This ensures that residents in informal settlements can have some kind of legal status and are protected from eviction.

Yet to incentivise regularisation and registration land administration institutions need to be streamlined and strengthened and come ‘to the people’ rather than making the people come to them. To be clear, such regularisation is not just to get the state in front of mostly poor and vulnerable people. It is critical because informality precipitates land markets that are unregulated and that often rip off informal residents and deny them access to services, knowing they are living in tenure insecurity and have few other choices as to where to live – they are also subject to ‘eminent domain’ or eviction from the state.

In another plus, formalising provides not only tenure security but also much needed income to municipal governments who are responsible for enforcing and supporting building standards and (hopefully improved) planning regimes – but who rarely have access to the funds to fulfil that function. Critically, value-assessed property tax revenue helps effective land use and ideally the enforcement of realistic and data-based planning visions. More effective tax collection of course should be applied not only to the poor and vulnerable, but more widely to all land and property owners.

Finally, to support climate sensitive planning, the registration of land and an up-to-date cadaster is useful. Households with tenure security can make climate-smart household investments because they don’t fear eviction. At the same time, an up to date cadastre layered with climate and disaster risk modelling, as well as ecological hotspots, helps planners to plan future ‘no build’ zones to prevent or mitigate loss of life from climate-induced disasters in high-risk areas.

For too long, land tenure practitioners have been focusing on the regularisation of rural areas, without managing to address the challenges of peri- and urban development. Our research and work with the World Bank shows that land administration, planning, climate risk response and dealing with the challenges of urbanisation should not be siloed but to the extent possible be integrated and done in a low-cost manner that supports the reality facing urban councils and city governments around the world. These realities are two-fold: 1. competing pressures to make land available to the poor; 2. to ensure their cities are presentable and liveable, offering the infrastructure, green space, and services that are needed for cities to flourish and be liveable. To this end, integrated urban land management is a critical pillar to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Goal 11 to “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable“. As acknowledged at COP30 in Belém, Brazil:

“Urbanization is a defining force of our time. When managed inclusively and strategically, it can unlock transformative pathways for climate action, economic growth, and social equity.”

– Li Junhua, head of UNDESA.

Header image:

[1] According to the study, projected exposure for the years 2030–40 for these cities—based on a composite index that combines projections for six key hazards (floods, heat stress, tropical cyclones, sea-level rise, water stress, and wildfires)— is considerably higher than for cities in higher-income countries, World Bank Making Cities Green, Resilient and Inclusive in a Changing Climate: Thriving, 2023,  xvii.

[2] Specifically, according to the urban Planning Proclamation No. 574/Citation2008 of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, any structure plan shall indicate mainly the magnitude and direction of growth of the urban center; principal land use classes, housing development, the layout and organization of major physical and social infrastructure, urban redevelopment intervention areas of the urban center, environmental aspects and industry zone. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21650020.2025.2451423#d1e576