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Urbanization in the global South is intricately linked with the internal mobility of people and the impacts of climate change. In India, changing precipitation patterns pose pressure on rural livelihoods through the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, contributing to rural-to-urban mobility. At destination, however, insufficient information is available on the complex mobility backgrounds of the new arrivals. We employ a mixed methods approach to investigate mobility patterns to Pune, India, with a special focus on the role of droughts. Combining a household survey with in-depth interviews and monthly precipitation data on district level, we use descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis to show a significant relationship between drought at origin and mobility to Pune. Particularly affected are recent arrivals, migrants of rural origin and from other states, and those currently living in informal areas. The link between droughts and mobility decisions is usually indirect, hidden behind economic conditions such as the loss of agricultural jobs. Paradoxically, migrants affected by droughts at origin face increased flood risk at destination. This risk, however, is often consciously taken in favor of better livelihood opportunities in the city. With climate scenarios projecting increasingly variable precipitation patterns, understanding the climate-mobility-urbanization nexus gains importance, especially for destination hotspots like the city of Pune. 

Emerging megacities in the global south face unprecedented transformation dynamics, manifested in rapid demographic, economic, and physical growth. Anticipating the associated sustainability and resilience challenges requires an understanding of future trajectories. Global change models provide consistent high-level urbanization scenarios. City-scale urban growth models accurately simulate complex physical growth. Modeling approaches linking the global and the local scale, however, are underdeveloped. This work introduces a novel approach to inform a local urban growth model by global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways to produce consistent maps of future urban expansion and population density via cellular automaton and dasymetric mapping. We demonstrate the approach for the case of Pune, India. Three scenarios are explored until 2050: business as usual (BAU), high, and low urbanization. After calibration and validation, the BAU scenario yields a 55% growth in Pune’s population and 90% in built-up extent, entailing significant impacts: Pune’s core city densifies further with up to 60,000 persons/km2, adding pressure to its strained infrastructure. In addition, 66–70% more residents are exposed to flood risk. Half of the urban expansion replaces agriculture, converting 167 km2 of land. The high-urbanization scenario intensifies these impacts. These results illustrate how spatially explicit scenario projections help identify impacts of urbanization and inform long-term planning. 

Urbanization proceeds globally and is often driven by migration. Simultaneously, cities face severe exposure to environmental hazards such as floods and heatwaves posing threats to millions of urban households. Consequently, fostering urban households’ resilience is imperative, yet often impeded by the lack of its accurate assessment. We developed a structural equation model to quantify households’ resilience, considering their assets, housing, and health properties. Based on a household survey (n = 1872), we calculate the resilience of households in Pune, India with and without migration biography and compare different sub-groups. We further analyze how households are exposed to and affected by floods and heatwaves. Our results show that not migration as such but the type of migration, particularly, the residence zone at the migration destination (formal urban or slum) and migration origin (urban or rural) provide insights into households’ resilience and affectedness by extreme weather events. While on average, migrants in our study have higher resilience than non-migrants, the sub-group of rural migrants living in slums score significantly lower than the respective non-migrant cohort. Further characteristics of the migration biography such as migration distance, time since arrival at the destination, and the reasons for migration contribute to households’ resilience. Consequently, the opposing generalized notions in literature of migrants either as the least resilient group or as high performers, need to be overcome as our study shows that within one city, migrants are found both at the top and the bottom of the resilience range. Thus, we recommend that policymakers include migrants’ biographies when assessing their resilience and when designing resilience improvement interventions to help the least resilient migrant groups more effectively. 

Liveability assessments of informal urban settlements are scarce. In India, a number of slum upgrading schemes have been implemented over the last decades aiming at better living conditions. However, these schemes rarely consider improvement in liveability as an explicit criterion, assuming that better physical conditions and the provision of basic services inevitably lead to better liveability. We use Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) to analyse liveability in four different informal settlements in Pune (India). We compare the liveability by conducting semi-structured interviews with residents and by analysing them in individual and aggregated FCMs. Each settlement represents an archetypical form of the upgradation process: non-upgraded (base case), in-situ upgraded, relocated, and temporary resettlement. The FCMs show that the liveability indicators availability of community space, proximity to public transportation, feeling of belonging, and good relationship with neighbours and community are central elements of these neighbourhoods’ liveability. The results suggest that upgradation may lead to an improved overall liveability but can also reduce it if not designed properly. The fostering of community agency, an integration of the neighbourhood into the formal city fabric, and the maintaining of cohesion during the shift from horizontal to vertical living emerged as critical factors. To ensure sustainable integration of liveability considerations in slum upgrading schemes, we suggest using indicators well-adapted to the local context, co-created with local experts and stakeholders, as well as periodic post-occupancy liveability evaluations. 

Large cities worldwide are increasingly suffering from a nexus of food, water, and energy supply challenges. This complex nexus can be analyzed with modern physico-economic system models. Only when practical knowledge from those affected, experts, and decision makers is incorporated alongside various other data sources, however, are the analyses suitable for policy advice. Here, we present a concept for “Sustainability Nexus Workshops” suitable for extracting and preparing relevant practical knowledge for nexus modeling and apply it to the case of Amman, Jordan. The experiences of the workshop participants show that, although water scarcity is the predominant resource problem in Jordan, there is a close connection between food, water, and energy as well as between resource supply and urbanization. To prevent the foreseeable significant degradation of water supply security, actions are needed across all nexus dimensions. The stakeholders demonstrate an awareness of this and suggest a variety of technical measures, policy solutions, and individual behavioral changes—often in combination. Improving the supply of food, water, and energy requires political and institutional reforms. In developing these, it must be borne in mind that the prevalent informal structures and illegal activities are both strategies for coping with nexus challenges and causes of them. 

Systems models of the Food–Water–Energy (FWE) nexus face a conceptual difficulty: the systematic integration of local stakeholder perspectives into a coherent framework for analysis. We present a novel procedure to co-produce and systematize the real-life complexity of stakeholder knowledge and forge it into a clear-cut set of challenges. These are clustered into the Pressure–State–Response (PSIR) framework, which ultimately guides the development of a conceptual systems model closely attuned to the needs of local stakeholders. We apply this approach to the case of the emerging megacity Pune and the Bhima basin in India. Through stakeholder workshops, involving 75 resource users and experts, we identified 22 individual challenges. They include exogenous pressures, such as climate change and urbanization, and endogenous pressures, such as agricultural groundwater over-abstraction and land use change. These pressures alter the Bhima basin’s system state, characterized by inefficient water and energy supply systems and regional scarcity. The consequent impacts on society encompass the inadequate provision with food, water, and energy and livelihood challenges for farmers in the basin. An evaluation of policy responses within the conceptual systems model shows the complex cause–effect interactions between nexus subsystems. One single response action, such as the promotion of solar farming, can affect multiple challenges. The resulting concise picture of the regional FWE system serves resource users, policymakers, and researchers to evaluate long-term policies within the context of the urban FWE system. While the presented results are specific to the case study, the approach can be transferred to any other FWE nexus system.