This panel examines how extreme weather events are reshaping health and wellbeing   among vulnerable urban communities in the Global South. We invite contributions that interrogate the intersections between health risks, social inequalities, adaptive capacities, and governance responses in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

As climate change accelerates, the impacts of floods, heatwaves, storms, and other weather extremes are increasingly mediated by urban vulnerabilities: precarious housing, informal labour, weak health systems, and fragmented governance. These processes disproportionately affect marginalised groups—such as migrants, informal workers, women, and the elderly—revealing how climate risks are inseparable from social and political determinants of health and broader wellbeing. Emerging evidence highlights a spectrum of adverse outcomes, including heat-related illness, excess mortality, reduced labour productivity, growing incidence of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and mental health stressors. These impacts both expose and exacerbate gaps in infrastructure, health services, and urban governance.

We particularly welcome contributions that:

•  adopt interdisciplinary and participatory approaches that integrate climate science, public health, and social inquiry;
• examine justice, power, and inequality in shaping vulnerability and adaptive capacity;
• critically assess policy and planning practices, identifying successes, failures, and unintended consequences; and
• situate local urban experiences within global dynamics, connecting everyday struggles to debates on climate agreements, SDGs, and sustainable futures.

By bringing together diverse cases across the Global South, this panel contributes to EADI’s concern with the tensions and interdependencies between global challenges and (G)local solutions. It seeks to generate comparative insights into how health-centred and socially just approaches to urban climate adaptation can both inform development research and guide practice towards more sustainable, equitable futures.

This panel is organised by the EADI Working Group on "Climate change and Health nexus"