Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the water-related climate change impacts and injustice for the urban poor in Tehran, a formerly resilient city to climate conditions which depended on communal water management systems. Revisiting the role of civil societies for climate adaptation is suggested as a key solution.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to analyze the water-related climate change impacts and injustice on the urban poor in Tehran Capital, a formerly resilient city to climate conditions and water shocks which used to depends on the communal water management systems in the past. To this purpose, the rapid urban changes, the consequent transformation of the climate systems and the resulting key hazards in Tehran (extreme drought and flood events) are identified first. Then, the study of cross-cutting issues and particularly, the in-depth analysis of transformations in the urban water system in Tehran reveal the key vulnerability and the exposure of human and natural systems to water-related climate risks in the city. Based on the integrated analysis of both urban and social/gender dimensions of the distribution of risks and inequalities, and the overlay of the vulnerability and exposures to the mentioned hazards, the informal settlements nearby the water valleys in the north, and a cluster of low-income neighborhoods in southern Tehran are recognized as highly at-risk systems from flood and drought events. At the end, the examination of the societal conditions, including the changes and the gaps in the institutional and the governance arrangements in the urban sectors reveals that the climate change impacts and poverty are deeply intertwined in Tehran. As a result, this research provide a set of recommendations on the need for revisiting the role of civil societies and the grassroots for urban water adaptation and climate justice in rapidly changing informal settlements of Tehran.