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.

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.

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.

<p>Adapting to growing urban water scarcity requires accurate assessments of present and future water security challenges. An estimated 1 billion people live in cities with intermittent public water supply, often resulting in highly unequal access to water. Under these conditions, households with below-average water access are most exposed to water insecurity. As a result, the full extent of water insecurity could substantially exceed the impacts identified by aggregate water security metrics. Here, we extend an existing coupled human and natural system model of the entire water sector in the Indian Upper Bhima basin, in order to analyze the degree to which water access inequality exacerbates urban water insecurity. The model integrates hydrologic modeling with urban water allocation institutions and water user agents, using data from a quantitative survey of almost 2,000 households in and around Pune, remote sensing data, as well as village-level census and water supply data. We use the model to assess water security impacts under historical and future droughts and various levels of supply augmentation. We find that a large share of households falls below critical water security thresholds before impacts are detected by aggregate metrics. While an unequal water distribution prevails, supply augmentation projects require several times the scale to meet given per capita water supply targets across the population than they would under a more equitable distribution. The findings demonstrate the extent to which current assessments of future urban water insecurity can underestimate the challenges ahead.</p>