SOCIAL INCLUSION & EQUALITY IN-DEPTH Comuna 8
How one community changed how a city approaches climate change
Researchers from Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh have spent more than a decade supporting a district in Medellín, turning years of community determination into a plan that is changing how an entire city approaches climate change.
Perched on steep, landslide-prone hillsides above Medellín in Colombia, the district of Comuna 8 is home to around 140,000 people. Many residents fled conflict, building their homes on some of the city’s most exposed land. When the rains come, so does the risk of flooding and landslide. In 1987, a landslide in the nearby neighbourhood of Villatina killed up to 500 people. With the climate changing and the city experiencing higher temperatures and more rainfall, the risk of further disasters is ever present.
What brought about change was community insistence underpinned by university expertise. But the process first began at district level. The Comuna 8 Housing and Public Services Committee, an organisation representing residents across the whole of Comuna 8, approached researchers from Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. Together, they established criteria to identify a neighbourhood where focused collaboration could begin. That neighbourhood was Pinares de Oriente where community leaders were willing to work with the committee and with the universities.
Residents organised, identified what they needed and conceived a plan that treated flooding, landslides, and water scarcity as interconnected challenges requiring an integrated response. That insistence would eventually produce something remarkable. But it needed partners willing to work in a genuinely different way.
Perched on steep, landslide-prone hillsides above Medellín, the district of Comuna 8 is home to around 140,000 people.
Comuna 8 residents.
District of Comuna 8.
Since 2014, researchers from Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, working alongside Colombian university partners, have been embedded in the life of this community. The project began through the Medellín Urban Innovation initiative, initially funded by the British Council, which examined whether Medellín’s internationally celebrated reputation for urban innovation was reaching its most vulnerable neighbourhoods.
What followed was years of patient, participatory work. Community members mapped hazards from their own doorsteps, using smartphones to photograph early signs of ground movement. Volunteers monitored drainage systems and helped redirect rainwater flows that were triggering small landslides.
The research teams contributed technical expertise and analytical capacity whilst the community contributed local knowledge, lived experience and, perhaps most critically, determination to see things change.
The outcome of all that work is a landmark document. The Integrated Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation Plan for Comuna 8 was formally approved by the city of Medellín in 2025 and placed in the public domain. It is widely regarded as the first of its kind for an urban edge community in the Global South, notable both for its integrated content and for the way it was produced.
The plan is not only a document. Residents have designed and installed rainwater harvesting systems that collect water from rooftops, reducing the surface runoff that triggers landslides whilst providing households with water for daily use. A community tree nursery is establishing vegetation cover on exposed slopes to stabilise soil, absorb rainfall and restore biodiversity. Ecological restoration gardens are reclaiming degraded land, preventing illegal construction on high-risk ground and beginning to rebuild the area’s food security. These are examples of community-owned infrastructure, designed and built by the people who depend on them, creating meaningful risk reduction rather than waiting for large-scale public investment.
These serve as practical demonstrations of the approach in action, managing water flows, reducing landslide risk and building food security in a part of the city that has historically been underserved.
Community-owned infrastructure, designed and built by the people who depend on it.
The research teams contributed technical expertise and analytical capacity whilst the community contributed local knowledge, lived experience and, perhaps most critically, determination to see things change.
With the plan formally approved, the research team has moved quickly to accelerate its reach. Current activities include consolidating two community-managed nature-based solutions as demonstration projects, developing indicators to monitor their effectiveness and producing a citizen’s guide to the plan in accessible language alongside short video formats for residents and community organisations.
The work is also influencing policy and practice at city scale. Between 2017 and 2023, the team took forward several related projects in other neighbourhoods across the district and in adjacent comunas. More recently, by May 2026, individual adaptation plans had been approved for all comunas in Medellín, a city of more than 2.6 million people. The team has worked with key local government agencies to promote replication and has presented findings at international forums. The extent to which the Comuna 8 plan contributed to that city-wide momentum is part of ongoing evidence collection and the team aims to provide details of that relationship as this progresses.
Beyond Medellín, the Global Urban Research Collaborative, led jointly by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, has extended its reach to flood risk communities in Mexico City and Puebla as well as to sustainable resource management in the Galapagos in Ecuador. The lessons from Medellín and how co-production genuinely can achieve change, are already travelling.
Plans approved for all comunas in Medellín, a city of more than
people
Funders include UKRI (NERC, EPSRC and ESRC Impact Acceleration Accounts), and The British Academy.
