Debra Roberts

Thinking globally, acting locally — institutionalizing climate change at the local government level in Durban, South Africa:

Durban is unusual among cities worldwide in having a municipal government that has developed a locally rooted climate change adaptation strategy. This paper considers how climate change came to be considered by local government against four institutional markers: the emergence of climate change advocates among local politicians and civil servants; climate change as a significant issue in municipal plans; staff and funds allocated to climate change issues; and a serious consideration of climate change issues within local government decision making. Considerable progress has been achieved on the second and third of these — but less so on the first and fourth. The paper highlights how climate change issues need to be rooted in local realities that centre on avoiding or limiting impacts from, for instance, heat waves, heavy rainfall and storm surges and sea-level rise, and also the ecological changes and water supply constraints brought about by climate change. To date, international agencies have paid little attention to adaptation, as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation) has been prioritized. This paper also stresses the importance of building local knowledge and capacity about climate change risks and adaptive responses. Without this, decision makers will continue seeing environmental issues as constraints on development rather than as essential underpinnings of and contributors to development.

Urban Climate Adaptation in the Global South Planning in an Emerging Policy Domain

Cities throughout the world face the challenge of preparing for climate change impacts. Since urban climate adaptation is an emerging policy domain, however, few institutions exist to guide cities among the first to take action. Drawing on institutional theory and case study research, this article examines the initiation and development of adaptation planning in two cities in the global south: Durban and Quito. The cases suggest that action in nascent policy domains is motivated by endogenous factors and sustained by taking advantage of opportunities rising and creatively linking new agendas to existing goals, plans, and programs.

Prioritizing climate change adaptation and local level resilience in Durban, South Africa

This paper describes the institutional and resource challenges and opportunities in getting different sectors in eThekwini Municipality (the local government responsible for planning and managing the city of Durban) to recognize and respond to their role in climate change adaptation. The Headline Climate Change Adaptation Strategy launched by the municipality in 2006 did not catalyze the development of sectoral plans or significantly influence the Integrated Development Plan, the key document through which the municipal government sets and implements development priorities. Possible causal factors for this include limited human and financial resources and more immediate and urgent development needs. To address the situation, the municipality’s Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department encouraged and supported three pilot sectors to develop their own municipal adaptation plans. This more sectoral approach encouraged greater interaction among the sectors and provided each with a clearer understanding of their needs and roles from an adaptation perspective. It also highlighted how climate change adaptation could be used as a tool to address development priorities. This work will be extended through research into the cost-benefits of Durban being an “early adapter”. Work has also begun on community-based adaptation (including support for reforestation projects that provide “green jobs”) and on responses to slow onset disasters, food security and water constraints.

Exploring ecosystem-based adaptation in Durban, South Africa: “learning-by-doing” at the local government coal face:

The lack of progress in establishing ambitious and legally binding global mitigation targets means that the need for locally based climate change adaptation will increase in vulnerable localities such as Africa. Within this context, “ecosystem-based adaptation” (EBA) is being promoted as a cost-effective and sustainable approach to improving adaptive capacity. Experience with the ongoing development of Durban’s Municipal Climate Protection Programme indicates that achieving EBA in cities means moving beyond the conceptualization of a uniform, one-size-fits-all layer of street trees and parks to a more detailed understanding of the complex ecology of indigenous ecosystems and their resilience under climate change conditions. It also means engaging with the role that this “bio-infrastructure” plays in improving the quality of life and socioeconomic opportunities of the most vulnerable human communities. Despite the long-term sustainability gains of this approach, implementation in Durban has been shown to be both technically challenging and resource intensive. The close association between human and ecological systems in addressing climate change adaptation has also led to the development of the concept of “community ecosystem-based adaptation”.

Towards transformative adaptation in cities: The IPCC's Fifth Assessment

This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper is drawn directly from Chapter 8 of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report. It includes the complete text of this chapter’s Executive Summary. The paper highlights the limits to what adaptation can do to protect urban areas and their economies and populations without the needed global agreement and action on mitigation; this is the case even for cities with high adaptive capacities. It ends with a discussion of transformative adaptation and where learning on how to achieve this needs to come from.

Urban environmental challenges and climate change action in Durban, South Africa

This paper reflects on the progress made in climate change adaptation in the city of Durban since the launch of the Municipal Climate Protection Programme in 2004. This includes the initial difficulties in getting the attention of key sectors within municipal government, and how this was addressed and also served by the more detailed understanding of the range of adaptation options and their cost-benefits. There is also a better understanding of the potentials and constraints on community-based adaptation and the opposition from some landowners to measures to protect and enhance ecosystem services. The paper ends with lessons learnt that contradict some common assumptions – for instance, what approaches best build support for climate change adaptation within local governments, what measures work and from where lessons can be drawn. It also describes the perhaps unexpected linkages between local action and international influence and highlights the need for international climate change negotiations to recognize the key roles of urban governments in developing locally rooted adaptation and resilience.

Durban's Local Agenda 21 programme: tackling sustainable development in a post-apartheid city

Durban’s Local Agenda 21 programme has been at the forefront of the Local Agenda 21 movement in Southern Africa since the mid-1990s. This paper describes the first four phases of the programme, 1994-2001. The paper also outlines the difficulties faced in localizing the sustainable development concept in Durban. Key amongst these challenges was the initiation and development of the programme during a period of local government transformation and restructuring. The perception that Local Agenda 21 has a “green” focus and is “anti-development” (due to its location within an environmental department) has also resulted in a lack of proactive and sustained political support. These problems have been exacerbated by limited human and financial resources, which have restricted the programme’s capacity to build support and consensus amongst stakeholders. Durban’s Local Agenda 21 programme has, however, helped keep sustainable development on the city’s agenda and has provided a mechanism through which local stakeholders can interact with local government around environmental management issues. The paper concludes with a section on the lessons learned and factors required to ensure future progress.

Moving towards inclusive urban adaptation: approaches to integrating community-based adaptation to climate change at city and national scale

Adaptation to climate change in urban areas presents a complex challenge. Consequently, approaches to urban adaptation should be both multilevel and multidimensional. Community-based adaptation (CBA) presents an opportunity for local-level participation in framing adaptation planning and activities, with wider transformative potential for urban governance. This paper presents five case studies from cities in the Global South which offer insights into the different scales at which CBA can be mainstreamed in urban contexts, and the various ways in which this is happening. These examples demonstrate five emerging opportunities for mainstreaming urban CBA, which include using CBA as part of a wider package of approaches; seizing processes of institutional reform as an opportunity to integrate community perspectives; institutionalizing new actors and approaches as a mechanism for scaling up multi-stakeholder approaches; ensuring top-down planning approaches are connected to local dynamics; and using participatory research to facilitate local communities in shaping planning processes. The cases also demonstrate that while obstacles to mainstreaming in urban contexts remain, some lessons in addressing these challenges have emerged, and CBA should, therefore, be a part of the toolbox of local and national urban adaptation policy frameworks.

Economics of climate change adaptation at the local scale under conditions of uncertainty and resource constraints: the case of Durban, South Africa

This paper describes the design and application of a benefit-cost model to the city of Durban’s (South Africa) climate change adaptation options. The approach addresses the inability to compile an accurate damage-cost function for economic prioritizations at the local level. It proposes that uncertainty over climate impacts and the efficacy of adaptation responses, in conjunction with the lack of economic data, high levels of economic informality and inequality make it difficult to link adaptation efforts to positive GDP impact in Durban. Instead, the research based its calculations of “benefits” on the number of people impacted and the extent of the welfare benefits imparted by the respective adaptation efforts. It also took into account the uncertainty over future events, capacity constraints, priorities of decision makers and the risk of maladaptation. The results were reported as benefit-cost ratios for 16 clusters of interventions (many of which were primarily the responsibility of one municipal department or agency) in each of four future scenarios (defined by minor or major climate change and weak or strong socio-institutional capacity). The paper presents and discusses the benefit-cost ratios and total benefits for each of the intervention clusters in each of the future scenarios. It emphasizes how these are influenced by choices of time frames. It also highlights how the most efficient interventions across all futures and time frames tend to be socio-institutional – for instance the creation of a cross-sectoral disaster management forum, sea level rise preparedness and early warning system, and creating climate change adaptation capacity within the water services unit. Ecosystem-based adaptation measures had moderate benefit-cost ratios, probably because in Durban the land that needs to be purchased for this is relatively expensive. Infrastructure-based clusters generally had the lowest benefit-cost ratios.

Six research priorities for cities and climate change

Xuemei Bai and colleagues call for long-term, cross-disciplinary studies to reduce carbon emissions and urban risks from global warming. Xuemei Bai and colleagues call for long-term, cross-disciplinary studies to reduce carbon emissions and urban risks from global warming.