Box 5.5: Case study – Creating a transformative pathway for resilience in Cape Town, South Africa
In 2018, when Cape Town first established its resilience planning efforts, the city was confronted by a severe drought crisis, which was then followed by the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis just 17 months later.
Cape Town’s resilience practices built upon post-apartheid local government planning and institutional reforms that were established to address the apartheid-era legacy of chronic inequality. In 1996, the South African Government established integrated development planning requirements for local governments (Beall, Crankshaw and Parnell 2000). This resulted in the development of local capacities within Cape Town and obliged the city to consider interrelationships between its spatial structure, infrastructure and urban services systems, and social and economic justice and environmental conditions. This integration-oriented approach, which is central to the creation of urban resilience, also led to the development of organizations and partnerships that became central to Cape Town’s resilience planning efforts in 2016–2019.5
In 2017, the city appointed a Chief Resilience Officer and created a new resilience team, with support from 100 Resilient Cities. The team completed a comprehensive resilience assessment, which included interviews with over 11,000 civilians and 200 thematic experts from community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, businesses, academia and the government (City of Cape Town 2019a). The assessment considered the separate exposures and risks facing each of the distinct areas of city services, city operations and the economy, along with various aspects of social vulnerability to those exposures (for example, health, security). It also focused on how risks in each area interacted with those of other areas, which helped refine cross-cutting priorities for action. The result of this process was an official city government commitment, in partnership with stakeholders, to implement 75 initiatives for policy reform, programmatic action and project implementation. These initiatives are organized under five key resilience- building workstreams, each with distinct goals, which together reflect the city’s defined transformative pathway for resilience: v a compassionate, holistically-healthy city v a connected, climate-adapted city v a capable, job-creating city v a collectively, shock-ready city v a collaborative, forward-thinking city.
During Cape Town’s resilience planning process, an acute water supply crisis emerged, which demanded the immediate and intensive deployment of its new resilience planning and partnership capacities. By early 2018, the city was preparing for “Day Zero”, i.e. the exhaustion of its potable water sources.6
Efforts to forestall Day Zero were mainly coordinated by the
city’s new resilience team and the related network of external support organizations. The Day Zero communication campaign reduced city-wide water use by 40 per cent from 2015 levels through the successful use of regulatory, technical and voluntary measures and related economic incentives. To support society-wide mobilization, the campaign built upon constructive relationships between the city, civil society organizations and the business community, while also encouraging citizen responsibility through a wide range of voluntary measures, including the collection of grey water for toilet flushing, installation of rainwater tanks and water-saving devices, and relandscaping of lawns. Some businesses removed themselves from the municipal water system, and new businesses emerged to meet the soaring demand for water-saving devices.
The design and execution of Day Zero campaign measures required constant consideration of their equity impacts, extensive public education and consideration of new “choice architectures” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) to steer behaviour change. Water pressure levels were balanced across different areas to ensure that sufficient volume was available to maintain equitable access for households of all income levels.
During the crisis management period, the city also began preparing a new long-term water strategy and applied the “bounce forward” developmental resilience approach while drafting its broader resilience strategy, reflecting both the near- and long-term aspects of resilience planning (City of Cape Town 2019b). The Cape Town Water Strategy was developed using future scenarios of rainfall uncertainty, demand uncertainty and institutional inertia. The sum of measures addressing each scenario was further evaluated using three climate change stress tests. The resulting strategy was based on a comprehensive systems approach, which considered all aspects of water supply, management, consumption and equity across the entire regional watershed, including the restoration and further development of natural systems.
The city launched its final comprehensive Cape Town Resilience Strategy in August 2019, and its final Cape Town Water Strategy in February 2020. In March 2020, the city identified its first cases of Covid-19, marking the start of an equally severe shock. Cape Town’s Chief Resilience Officer and resilience team immediately assumed city-wide coordination and response planning on behalf of the city, applying approaches and coordination mechanisms developed in the previous resilience strategy planning efforts.
5 These organizations are cited in the Cape Town Resilience Strategy as the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town, GreenCape, the Cape Investor Centre, the Western Cape Economic Development Partnership and SDI. (City of Cape Town 2019a, p. 2).
6 The city and its strained water utility had to address the crisis within the context of unique policy, jurisdictional and socioeconomic constraints. In 2001, the South Africa Government instituted a hard- won gain for the country’s historically disenfranchised majority: the guarantee of 6,000 litres per month of free water supply to all households. The central government also transferred water service responsibilities from central and provincial governments to municipalities, while retaining decision-making authority and investment responsibility for new water supply infrastructure. The legacy of low water service tariffs, the free water policy, growing service demand and the inability to expand water supply infrastructure strained the local water utility, which was then further impacted by the drought.
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