Urban Shade

Urban Shade is a NIHR-funded global health research consortium where researchers along with local poor and marginalised communities are working to improve health service responses to extreme weather events caused by climate change. Researchers from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and The George Institute for Global Health India (TGI) are working alongside SDI-Kenya and three partners in Sierra Leone; Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), Centre of Dialogue on Human Settlement and Poverty Alleviation (CODOHSAPA) and The Institute of Gender and Children’s Health Research (IGCHR). The project are located in ten locations in India, Kenya and Sierra Leone. More than one billion live in informal settlements around the world. The negative impacts of climate change such as landslides, flooding, heatwaves, and drought affect the more marginalised and poorest urban communities. These communities often lack access to basic health services. Urban Shade researchers are working with communities living and working in informal settlements in the cities and city outskirts with a focus on marginalisation such as job, income, gender, age, disability, ethnicity, caste among others. These communities include those living near riverbanks and on hillsides in Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in India, coastal communities in Mombasa and Kilifi in Kenya, and three informal settlements in Sierra Leone’s Freetown. Working alongside communities, community-based organisations, health service providers and public bodies in each location, researchers will assess the health and social vulnerabilities and health service impacts of recent extreme weather events, as well as the capacity of local health services to deliver during and following such events. They will co-produce new interventions to strengthen these systems, and establish equitable ways of working in partnership in each location.