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Climate change processes pose significant challenges to development in cities across West Africa. These processes shape and mediate urban vulnerability across urban areas and hinder wider development efforts across these cities. This paper reviews these emerging perspectives within the context of UN-Habitat's work in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso and Saint-Louis, Senegal. It argues that policy-makers and researchers need to engage with issues of climate change and development at an urban scale and across “ordinary cities” through exploring the range of vulnerabilities inherent in each city. Specifically, the paper illustrates the diversities and similarities of climate change processes that exist across these two medium sized, or ordinary West African cities, the intersections with existing economic profiles and potential impacts and the emerging urban governance responses to these issues. It demonstrates the need to move beyond constructions of an archetypal “West African” city, and illustrates the emerging work by UN-Habitat and local partners in developing localised knowledges about urban vulnerabilities and the multiple and divergent ways in which these issues are beginning to be addressed.

Climate change processes pose significant challenges to development in cities across West Africa. These processes shape and mediate urban vulnerability across urban areas and hinder wider development efforts across these cities. This paper reviews these emerging perspectives within the context of UN-Habitat’s work in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso and Saint-Louis, Senegal. It argues that policy makers and researchers need to engage with issues of climate change and development at an urban scale and across ‘ordinary cities’ through exploring the range of vulnerabilities inherent in each city. Specifically, the paper illustrates the diversities and similarities of climate change processes that exist across these two medium sized, or ordinary West African cities, the intersections with existing economic profiles and potential impacts and the emerging urban governance responses to these issues. It demonstrates the need to move beyond constructions of an archetypal ‘West African’ city, and illustrates the emerging work by UN-Habitat and local partners in developing localised knowledges about urban vulnerabilities and the multiple and divergent ways in which these issues are beginning to be addressed.

Sea level rise (SLR) caused by climate change presents challenges for public planners all over the world. In this study, practical challenges and ethical factors in adaptation to SLR were identified based on interviews with planners in Sweden. Six challenges were identified: lack of knowledge and human resources, lacking integration and coordination, lacking or insufficient frameworks for dealing with long-time-horizons, responsibility for implementation and financing, and goal conflicts in the process of implementing adaptation policy. These challenges are then developed into a typology of ethical factors that are of particular importance for adaptation to SLR, categorised as input-oriented, process-oriented and outcome-oriented ethical factors. The challenges and ethical factors identified in this paper are the first step taken towards answering the question of what a sustainable and ethical adaptation to SLR in the context of local and regional policy-making could look like. QC 20210507 Sea-rims