This is a past event
Please join us for a seminar given by Professor Hildegardo Cordova Aguilar of Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima, Peru) on 'Vulnerability of Lima's Peripheral Human Settlements to Climate Change'.
The seminar will take place in St. Mary's, Room 105 on Wednesday, 28th September from 11-12. All are welcome to attend.
Abstract
Climate change is generally understood as a process that may bring strong negative effects to the environment, especially in the tropical less developed countries. Grossly, we may accept that the main interest to study this phenomenon has been in relation to its impacts on rural areas which mainly affect food production, but there is also a big worry in urban centres. Such is the case of Metropolitan Lima where there are already very sensible problems related to water provision to the human settlements living at the periphery, and to the building of shelters and infrastructure to support an eventual tropical rain. To these we may add the immigrations that might accelerate population movements to the city in case the rural decide to leave their fields due to insufficient rainfall for their crops.
In this presentation I will show a brief state of the art of the human settlements leaving at the periphery of Metropolitan Lima and their associated vulnerabilities and environmental risks. The object is to sensitize the decision-makers about the need to do interdisciplinary work to present proposals leading to integral and sustainable solutions. We depart from the premise that climate change is a natural process reinforced by human activities and its control strategies are rationally good but irrelevant. Instead of that we need to redirect our energies to adaptation strategies that may diminish as much as possible the vulnerabilities and disasters.