In the shadow of Lagos's gleaming developments, residents of informal settlements are quietly engineering some of the most creative climate solutions on the continent—and then watching them bulldozed in the name of progress. These communities, home to more than half of Lagos's population, have developed sophisticated systems to survive in a city where roughly 40% is water and flooding is not a question of if but when.
Brianna Castro, an assistant professor of urban sustainability at Yale School of the Environment, spent months documenting how residents of these settlements have transformed scraps into survival strategies. What she found challenges everything policymakers assume about vulnerability and adaptation. Rather than passive victims waiting for rescue, these residents have become innovators, builders, and entrepreneurs—turning the very materials of their precarious lives into income and resilience.
The ingenuity is specific and striking. When floodwaters rise—a regular occurrence in low-elevation coastal plains—residents have constructed makeshift drainage systems and adaptive infrastructures. They stabilize land with sand infilling, build bridges to connect structures, and establish group shelters. Most remarkably, they collect plastic waste, melt it down, and pack it into the interior floors of their homes to create elevation above flood levels. As Castro explains, this simple intervention allows families to remain in their homes and maintain daily normalcy through flood stages—a dignity that government relocation programs rarely offer.
But the economic dimension is equally important. Residents have built livelihoods directly from climate action. Some earn income procuring sand to stabilize land. Others collect and distribute plastic waste as a service. Still others dig freshwater wells, providing water security for their own neighborhoods and wealthier districts across the city. These are not informal jobs—they are essential infrastructure services that benefit the entire metropolis, performed by the people with the fewest resources and the most at stake.
Yet Nigeria's government is pursuing coastal development policies that systematically dismantle these settlements, often framing the demolitions as climate protection measures. The state, Castro observes, views these spaces as having no value and causes maximum damage during evictions. What is lost in this process is not just homes but tested knowledge—adaptation strategies refined through lived experience in the harshest conditions, strategies that could be studied, improved, and scaled to help others.
The contradiction is stark. The people most vulnerable to climate change have developed working solutions to climate change. Meanwhile, the policies meant to protect Lagos from rising waters are erasing the communities that already know how to live with them. Castro's research, published in Climate and Development, is a call to reverse this logic: "Instead, we should start asking about the strategies people in the toughest conditions are using to live well, and what gets lost during these evictions that could have been scaled to help others."
For Lagos and cities like it around the world, the question is whether adaptation will be built on the innovations of those most affected, or whether climate action will continue to mean displacement for the poor and profit for developers. The residents of these settlements have already answered their part of the question.