Description
Climate change impacts are scale and context specific, and cities are likely to bear some of the greatest costs. In recent years cities have begun to craft their own climate change responses against the backdrop of the reluctance displayed by nation-states in committing to emissions reductions and managing the consequences of climate change.
Climate Change at the City Scale presents a fresh contribution to climate change literature, which has largely neglected the role of cities in spite of their increasingly important role in the global economy. The book focuses on the impacts of climate change in the rapidly evolving city of Cape Town, and captures the experiences of the Cape Town Climate Change Think Tank, a hybrid knowledge partnership which has produced research on a range of urban governance, impacts, mitigation and adaptation challenges by the City.
Cape Town has long been acknowledged as an innovator in the area of urban environmental management, notwithstanding its limited resources to manage the demand for a more resilient and equitable future. By documenting the work and experiences of the City’s efforts to define its own climate future, the book provides a provocative case study of the way in which the science-policy interface can be managed to inform urban transformation.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2. Understanding Cape Town’s Climate (Mark Tadross, Anna Taylor and Peter Johnston) 3. Understanding the Risks to Cape Town of Inundation from the Sea (Geoff Brundrit and Anton Cartwright) 4. Potential Impact of Climate Change on Coastal Flooding: A Case Study of the Salt river, Cape Town (Rhydar Harris, Stephen Luger, Cathy Sutherland and Mark Tadross) 5. Energy Scenarios for Cape Town: Exploring the Implications of Different Energy Futures for the City up to 2050 (Sustainable Energy Africa, Energy Research Centre, African Centre for Cities and the City of Cape Town) 6. Opportunities and challenges in establishing a Low Carbon Zone in the Western Cape Province (Yvonne Lewis and Meagan Jooste) 7. Cities and Climate Change Ex Abundanti Cautela – ‘From An Excess Of Caution’? (Jaap de Visser) 8. Climate Change and Possible Legal Liability: Implications for the City of Cape Town (Debbie Collier and Jan Glazewski) 9. Towards a Climate Resilient and Low Carbon City of Cape Town: Climate Change, Planning Law and Practice (Jan Glazewski) 10. Reducing the Pathology of Risk: Developing an Integrated Municipal Coastal Protection Zone for the City of Cape Town (Darryl Colenbrander, Catherine Sutherland, Gregg Oelofse, Howard Gold and Sakhile Tsotsobe) 11. Supporting City-scale Decisions in the Context of Climate Change: The Case of the City of Cape Town (Anton Cartwright, Brett Cohen, David Liddell) 12. South African Coastal Cities: Governance Responses to Climate Change Adaptation (Gina Ziervogel and Susan Parnell) 13. City of Cape Town Solar Water Heater by-law: Barriers to implementation (Jan Froestad, Clifford Shearing, Tom Herbstein and Sakina Grimwood) 14. Conclusion
