The GCRF Climate Change and Urban Violence Global Engagement Network (CCUVN) is a two-year project from 2019-2021. It is led by Professor Nausheen H. Anwar, Director, Karachi Urban Lab, at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, Pakistan, and in collaboration with the UK lead, Dr Arabella Fraser, School of Geography, Nottingham University.

Supported by the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), the networks bring together UK researchers with collaborators from across the developing world to share expertise and find solutions.

Marginalised urban communities in the developing world are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and are also experience the direct impacts of violence, such as crime or state-led displacements and evictions. Climate change also changes the conditions under which violence can occur.

The project brings together two research communities – those working on violence reduction and those on adapting to climate change – for the first time in a sustained manner, in order to understand these links in greater depth, and work with practitioners to find solutions to support urban environments to be safer and more sustainable.

Objectives

• To generate inter-disciplinary and cross-regional knowledge about the linkages between climate change and urban violence.
• To undertake systematic review and support practitioner learning about local-level, innovative and participatory interventions to reduce risks in violence and climate-change affected urban contexts.
• To raise the policy profile of the importance of considering urban violence-climate linkages, and the practical and ethical implications of the issues for policy and governance, across relevant security, climate change adaptation and urban development actors

Activities

The network will be organizing inter-disciplinary regional workshops with researchers, local and international civil society organisations, municipal governments and international agencies. The network will also support related practitioner learning through stronger exchange about initiatives to address climate risks and peace building in urban contexts, arranging webinars, and a practitioner exchange forum.