Constructed wetlands (cws) for wastewater treatment may be part of the answer to the urgent need for a change in the approach to wastewater treatment in developing countries. Although thailand has several cws, there have been no studies of their sustainability. To remedy this, the sustainability of three promising cws in very different settings was assessed. These were located at koh phi phi, a world-renowned international tourist and holiday resort; sakon nakhon, a northeastern provincial capital; and ban pru teaw, a small post-tsunami village on the andaman coast.

The fragmentation of urban landscapes – or the inter-penetration of the built-up areas of cities and the open spaces in and around them – is a key attribute of their spatial structure. Analyzing satellite images for 1990 and 2000 for a global sample of 120 cities, we find that cities typically contain or disturb vast quantities of open spaces equal in area, on average, to their built-up areas. We also find that fragmentation, defined as the relative share of open space in the urban landscape, is now in decline.

The January 2001 earthquake that struck the state of Gujarat in India damaged or destroyed some 8,000 villages and 490 towns. In the months and years after the earthquake, many organizations undertook widespread reconstruction programmes. One such collaboration between the NGO CARE India and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) built 5,554 permanent houses as well as schools and community centres in 23 villages. This paper revisits 10 of the 23 villages that were partially or fully rebuilt by FICCI–CARE, 10 years after the earthquake.

This paper presents a strategy for scaling climate change adaptation within urban areas. The strategy specifically focuses on the requirements for mobilizing large amounts of capital for adaptation and other urban risk reduction above and beyond the amounts that will likely be mobilized through new international adaptation funds. The paper, based on a report published by ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability, proposes a re-framing of the urban adaptation and disaster reduction challenge.

Dhaka is one of the largest megacities in the world and its population is growing rapidly. Due to its location on a deltaic plain, the city is extremely prone to detrimental flooding, and risks associated with this are expected to increase further in the coming years due to global climate change impacts as well as the high rate of urbanization the city is facing. The lowest-lying part of Dhaka, namely Dhaka East, is facing the most severe risk of flooding.

The lack of progress in establishing ambitious and legally binding global mitigation targets means that the need for locally based climate change adaptation will increase in vulnerable localities such as Africa. Within this context, “ecosystem-based adaptation” (EBA) is being promoted as a cost-effective and sustainable approach to improving adaptive capacity.

This paper analyzes the dynamics of population growth and urban expansion in the city of Xalapa, Mexico. It focuses on the establishment of informal settlements, which are one of the many threats to forest and farmland conservation (although these settlements are not the only source of the problem). Spatial analysis of growth data (using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and statistical modelling) showed that by 2007, 90 per cent of the land area in the municipality of Xalapa had already been altered by human activity.

This paper describes the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to map informal settlements in Cuttack, India in ways that enhance and support residents’ participation in the data collection and planning process. Rather than

This paper provides an introduction to the practice of community-led enumerations as conducted by Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI). It sets out the historical context for enumerations, which came out of a need in India in 1975 to find a more long-term solution to evictions, and charts its subsequent evolution and spread throughout other countries. Enumerations can help to build a community, define a collective identity, facilitate development priority setting and provide a basis for engagement between communities and government on planning and development.

This paper questions the accuracy and validity of the criticisms made by Ananya Roy regarding the approach to community development of a Mumbai-based NGO, SPARC, and its partner grassroots federations in Mumbai. This includes the suggestion that the focus on sanitation rather than on land tenure is an appeal to middle-class values about cleanliness and that their support for relocating those who lived right next to the railway tracks made them agents of the state.