Gina Ziervogel

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Cape Town

To enhance understanding of the process of climate change adaptation and to facilitate the planning and implementation of socially‐just adaptation strategies, deeper consideration of the factors that impede adaptation is required. In response, scholars have increasingly identified barriers to adaptation in the literature. But, despite this progress...

When managing urban flood risk, traditional flood risk management which prioritizes infrastructural and technical solutions is important but is not sufficient to reduce the risk to acceptable levels, particularly in informal settlements. Understanding how flood risk is governed needs to complement flood risk interventions in order to be able to mov...

In this paper we review current approaches and recent advances in research on climate impacts and adaptation in South Africa. South Africa has a well‐developed earth system science research program that underpins the climate change scenarios developed for the southern African region. Established research on the biophysical impacts of climate change...

Understanding how and why farmers have responded to past climatic change is a necessary step to informing how to support current and future adaptation. This paper explores commercial farmers’ perceptions of and responses to shifting climates in the Little Brak River area along South Africa’s south coast. It aims to evaluate changes in the climate e...

Climate change poses considerable challenges to food security. Adapting food systems both to enhance food security for the poor and vulnerable and to prevent future negative impacts from climate change will require attention to more than just agricultural production. This article surveys the multiple components of food security, particularly those...

Climate change research is broad, diverse and constantly growing. Cross- and interdisciplinary understanding is essential for generating robust science advice for policy. However, it is challenging to prioritise and navigate the ever-expanding peer-reviewed literature. To address this, we gathered input from experts across various research fields t...

Climate change research is broad, diverse and constantly growing. Cross- and interdisciplinary understanding is essential for generating robust science advice for policy. However, it is challenging to prioritise and navigate the ever-expanding peer-reviewed literature. To address this, we gathered input from experts across various research fields t...

Most protected area impact research that uses counterfactuals draws heavily on quantitative methods, data, and knowledge types, making it valuable in producing generalizations but limited in temporal scope, historical detail, and habitat diversity and coverage of ecosystem services. We devised a methodological pluralistic approach, which supports s...

Introduction There are mounting demands to undertake climate risk and vulnerability (CRV) assessments for policy, planning, funding, insurance, and compliance reasons. In Africa, given the adaptation imperative, this is particularly important. Increasingly, it has become clear that sub-national assessments are needed to inform adaptation practice....

The structure and functioning of formal and informal governance arrangements and associated infrastructure prior to major environmental disturbance play a central role in how cities experience and respond to such events. This paper considers how city managers, businesses, and residents responded to two disturbances experienced in the City of Cape T...

Increasingly, city governments are having to deal with climate change repercussions alongside those of other disasters, all while addressing its implications for both daily life and future sustainability. This paper argues that to build resilience to future climate extreme events and multi-hazards, it is essential to establish a systemic approach a...

Climate change is increasingly being seen as a complex problem that requires a change in personal and practical dimensions. To support this, climate change educators need to make use of pedagogic approaches that enable students to engage in relational values of care, empathy and connection alongside understanding the problem and potential responses...

Climate change is increasingly being seen as a complex problem that requires a change in personal and practical dimensions. To support this, climate change educators need to make use of pedagogic approaches that enable students to engage in relational values of care, empathy and connection alongside understanding the problem and potential responses...

South Africa is wrestling with increasing climate change impacts and how to respond. The 2022 IPCC Working Group II Report synthesises the latest evidence on climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation, and what this means for climate-resilient development. In this commentary, South African authors on the Report reflect on its key findings...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

When we talk about climate change, we often use abstract ideas such as, ‘the planet is warming’ or ‘rainfall is becoming more unpredictable.’ But, how do these changes impact the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ families across the world? In ‘Everyday Stories of Climate Change’ you will travel to Bangladesh, South Africa, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, and Barbuda...

Resilience thinking has undergone profound theoretical developments in recent decades, moving to characterize resilience as a socio‐natural process that requires constant negotiation between a range of actors and institutions. Fundamental to this understanding has been a growing acknowledgment of the role of power in shaping resilience capacities a...

For leaders, planners and people around the world facing uncertainty about actions to resolve our planetary crises, we offer a concrete framework for action. We take the six core areas identified for urgent action by humanity from our 2019 paper in BioScience, World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency, and convert these into a framework for c...

‘We have kicked the can down the road once again – but we are running out of road.’ – Rachel Kyte, Dean of Fletcher School at Tufts University. We, in our capacities as scientists, economists, governance and policy specialists, are shifting from warnings to guidance for action before there is no more ‘road.’ The science is clear and irrefutable; hu...

(Replaces preprint) We have kicked the can down the road once again-but we are running out of road.'-Rachel Kyte, Dean of Fletcher School at Tufts University. We, in our capacities as scientists, economists, governance and policy specialists, are shifting from warnings to guidance for action before there is no more 'road.' The science is clear and...

Learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic opens an opportunity for enhanced research and action on inclusive urban resilience to climate change. Lessons and their implications are used to describe a climate resilience research renewal agenda. Three key lessons are identified. The first lesson is generic, that climate change risk coexists and inte...

In light of the increasing call for climate action, there is a growing body of literature studying the ways in which informal settlements in the Global South are adapting to the impacts of climate change. In these particularly vulnerable communities where the existing infrastructural vulnerabilities faced by residents are exacerbated by the hazards...

Disaster planning for slow-onset city-wide shocks will be become increasingly necessary, particularly as cities face increasingly severe climate hazards. This paper provides unique insight into the disaster planning and management that was undertaken by the City of Cape Town government in response to its most severe hydrological drought on record....

Over the last 50 years, studies have shown a decline in the use of mountain lands, a phenomenon termed land abandonment. We investigate the causal mechanisms of land use change in a mountain catchment important for regional water supplies in the southwestern Cape of South Africa. Uniquely, we include nature-based recreational land use types typical...

Urban citizens increasingly need to adapt to climate risk. This is especially the case in informal settlements that have limited state engagement and are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Community-based adaptation (CBA) in the informal settlement has the potential to support the transformation that re-shapes power relations as well as red...

Calls for transformative adaptation to climate change require attention to the type of capacity building that can support it. Community-level capacity building can help to ensure ownership and legitimacy of longer-term interventions. Given that marginalized communities are highly vulnerable to climate risk, it is important to build their capacity t...

In this article, on behalf of The Shadow Places Network, we outline a working manifesto of politics and practice. We mobilise the format of the manifesto to speak to an uncertain and damaged future, to begin to imagine other possible worlds. For feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, whose thinking inspires this network, shadow places are the underside...

Cape Town's water injustices are entrenched by the mismatch between government interventions and the lived realities in many informal settlements and other low-income areas. This transdisciplinary study draws on over 300 stories from such communities, showing overwhelming frustration with the municipality's inability to address leaking pipes, fault...

For climate urbanism to be relevant in informal settlements, it’s proponents needs to embrace the messy reality that there are no easily implemented, off-the-shelf adaptation solutions. Existing neoliberal climate adaptation responses, which often entrench inequality, are unlikely to succeed in informal settlements. The current groundswell of deman...

The multifunctionality of water in social–ecological processes complicates its governance, especially in cities where heterogenous populations lead different lives and hold different values. This challenge can potentially be addressed by combining bottom-up and top-down approaches through multilevel governance. Drawing on research from two large, w...

Although several semi-arid African countries are decentralizing water services and attempting to increase the participation of local actors in water resource management, how effectively this is working, and whether it is improving water access, is not yet well researched. Little attention has been paid to the capacities (in terms of knowledge and r...

There is a long history of fire management in African savannas, but knowledge of historical and current use of fire is scarce in savanna-woodland biomes. This study explores past and present fire management practices and perceptions of the Khwe (former hunter-gatherers) and Mbukushu (agropastoralists) communities as well as government and non-gover...

This research explores the agent dynamics, learning processes, and enabling conditions for the implementation of microscale win-win solutions that contribute to energy poverty eradication and climate resilience in a selection of low-income rural and peri-urban communities in India, Indonesia, and South Africa. We define these micro-solutions as ene...

Cape Town recently endured a record-breaking drought which nearly ended in disaster for the city's water supply. Municipal authorities introduced several measures to curb water demand using both monetary and other incentives, but little is known about how effective these measures were at encouraging people to save water. Previous literature shows n...

This issue of NokokoPod explores the Cape Town drought of 2017 and 2018 and the lessons learned from it. The podcast for this discussion is available on the Nokoko journal website. This conversation took place on March 4th, with Logan Cochrane in Canada and Gina Ziervogel in South Africa. This version of the PDF has been reviewed by Logan Cochrane...

We explore why and how corporations seek to build community resilience as a strategic response to grand challenges. Based on a comparative case study analysis of four corporations strategically building community resilience in five place-based communities in South Africa, as well as three counterfactual cases, we develop a process model of corporat...

In the rapidly changing and uncertain world of the Anthropocene, positive visions of the future could play a crucial role in catalysing deep social-ecological transformations to help guide humanity towards more sustainable and equitable futures. This paper presents the outcomes from a novel visioning process designed to elicit creative and inspirat...

While social and economic considerations are key concerns driving development in South Africa, successful sustainable development cannot occur without understanding the potential implications of how the climate and environment are changing. With a growing number of people migrating to and residing in urban areas it is becoming ever more pressing th...

Vertical integration, which creates strategic linkages between national and sub-national levels, is being promoted as important for climate change adaptation. Decentralisation, which transfers authority and responsibility to lower levels of organisation, serves a similar purpose and has been in place for a number of decades. Based on four case stud...

There are growing calls, across a continuum from international agreements to social movements, for strengthening urban resilience alongside reductions in inequality and poverty. Although there is broad agreement on what the term resilience means in general, different perspectives exist on how the concept should be implemented locally and controvers...

The three-year drought that hit Cape Town was the local expression of the global climate change emergency. It shows what happens when the normal demands of running a city, with its many development challenges, collide with a climate ‘shock’ like this one. The City of Cape Town was one of the most important players in responding to the drought, but...

The drought that drew the world's attention to Cape Town in early 2018 was the worst on record, threatening to cut off household taps for 4 million people. Even before the drought, the city's relation to water was complex; South Africa still struggles with the legacy of racial inequality including its implications for water justice. Spatial and eco...

The existing literature on barriers to adaptation focuses predominantly on the broad, generic factors, such as financial, technological or institutional factors, as examples that might constrain adaptation. Not enough is known, however, about how barriers converge in localities, what drives them and how they interact to affect adaptation processes...

As the drought in Cape Town intensified in 2017/2018 and then abated later in 2018, international and national attention was focussed on Cape Town. It can be argued that Cape Town received such a high level of attention, because of its global status as a tourist destination, an economic hub of South Africa and because of how the political and burea...

The severe drought experienced by Cape Town in 2017 and 2018 and the near miss of “Day Zero” should serve as a warning for other cities as to what climate impacts might look like in future. This brief on Cape Town’s experience, through a series of interviews, offers twelve lessons to share with other cities, municipalities and those trying to stren...

Although participatory approaches are becoming more widespread, to date vulnerability assessments have largely been conducted by technocrats and have paid little attention to underlying causes of vulnerability, such as inequality and biased governance systems. Participatory assessments that recognise the social roots of vulnerability, however, are...

The intersecting challenges of urbanization, growing inequality, climate and environmental risk and economic sustainability require new modes of urban governance. Although the urban poor are increasingly recognized as needing to be part of climate adaptation planning and implementation, many governance arrangements fail to explicitly include them....

The networks that support collaboration and knowledge exchange around climate risk and response are emerging as central to climate adaptation. Yet, there is limited empirical knowledge about the conditions by which these networks can go beyond knowledge sharing to achieving on the ground. This paper presents two case studies of networks between uni...

In the context of global environmental change much hope is placed in the ability of resilience thinking to help address environment-related risks. Numerous initiatives aim at incorporating resilience into urban planning practices. The purpose of this paper is to open up a conversation on urban resilience by unpacking how diverse science methods con...

Understanding the causality of vulnerability is difficult to do and consequently has received insufficient attention. Root causes of vulnerability need to be understood and addressed to support adaptation that addresses climate risk and inequality. This paper contributes to this by examining vulnerability from a structural perspective for the case...

This paper responds to the call by Wise et al. (2014) to improve our understanding of decisions related to urban climate adaptation by situating policy interventions in a broader governance context. To develop this argument we use a qualitative case study from Cape Town, South Africa of a local government intervention in an informal settlement suff...

The aim of the paper is to present a story about the 2015 to early 2017 Windhoek drought in the context of climate change while using the narrative approach. The story that is presented here is derived from the engagement of participants in a transdisciplinary, co-productive workshop, the Windhoek Learning Lab 1 (March 2017), as part of the FRACTAL...

SDGs and IPCC Cities offer an unprecedented opportunity for a transformative urban agenda. This also requires bold, integrated action to address constraints imposed by economic, cultural, and political dynamics. In our commentary, we move beyond a narrow, techno-centric view and identify five key knowledge pathways needed to catalyze urban transfor...

This paper looks at the intersection of climate change adaptation and water security in southern Africa. It looks at two cases. Firstly it focuses on challenges around water security in the Limpopo basin, with a focus on livelihoods. It draws on the ASSAR project (Adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions) VRA (vulnerability and risk assessment) wor...

The Urban Climate Change Research Network's Second Assessment Report on Climate Change in Cities (ARC3.2) is the second in a series of global, science-based reports to examine climate risk, adaptation, and mitigation efforts in cities. The book explicitly seeks to explore the implications of changing climatic conditions on critical urban physical a...

New forms of governance that foster multi-level and collaborative action have been identified as key to climate change adaptation. Ecosystem-based adaptation is emerging as an important type of adaptation response. Despite its recognized promise, it remains a challenging task to conceptualize governance regimes for it because of the involvement of...

Resilience thinking has been roundly critiqued for not accounting for the political – and inherently power-laden – structures that shape decision-making. In the light of the range of critiques as well as the increasing global momentum around resilience thinking, this paper develops the concept of ‘Negotiated Resilience’. The concept highlights proc...

Drawing from the proceedings of an expert workshop with academics, researchers, government and NGO participants working in diverse countries in southern Africa and beyond, this paper reviews the discourse on resilience, both conceptually and in practice. We highlight opportunities to develop and apply a more situated, equity-sensitive and context-r...

Developing countries share many common challenges in addressing current and future climate risks. A key barrier to managing these risks is the limited availability of accessible, reliable and relevant weather and climate information. Despite continued investments in Earth System Modelling, and the growing provision of climate services across Africa...

Resilience building has become a growing policy agenda, particularly for urban risk management. While much of the resilience agenda has been shaped by policies and discourses from the global North, its applicability for cities of the global South, particularly African cities, has not been sufficiently assessed. Focusing on rights of urban citizens...

With increasing funding directed towards climate change adaptation (CCA) in developing countries, there is a growing need to understand how this support is landing on the ground and impacting on the targeted vulnerable communities. Due to failure of top-down approaches, international organisations such as the adaptation fund are now demanding direc...

Understanding the causality of vulnerability is difficult to do and consequently has received insufficientattention. Root causes of vulnerability need to be understood and addressed to support adaptationthat addresses climate risk and inequality. This paper contributes to this by examining vulnerabilityfrom a structural perspective for the case of...

Fair processes and just outcomes are recognised globally as an important part of climate change adaptation and water resource management in particular. Achieving this is challenging, particularly in a developing country context where there is a myriad of pressing needs and conflicting ideas of what is needed across scales. This study takes a qualit...

This chapter’s main objective is to provide the context of the book and to introduce the subsequent chapters. The physical basis of the global climate change challenge is briefly outlined and the consequences for the societies primarily at the local scale are discussed. A short overview of how the international policy level responds to the challeng...

The commitment to understanding the implications of a 1.5 °C global temperature warming limit has contributed to a growing realisation that transformative adaptation is necessary to avoid catastrophic environmental and social consequences. This is particularly the case in urban settlements where disconnection from the systems that support life is p...

Vulnerability and Risk Assessment process aims to develop a common understanding among various stakeholders of the main hazards and issues affecting those living in a given socio-ecological landscape. This is done in order to design measures that reduce risk, enhance wellbeing and promote resilience to hazards in the landscape.

Despite the growth of adaptation plans and action by municipalities, there are limited examples of opportunities for effectively mainstreaming climate adaptation into policy and practice in local government. This paper uses the experiment of co-producing an adaptation plan for a small municipality in the Western Cape Province, South Africa, to illu...

This paper reviews the current theoretical scholarship on maladaptation and provides some specific case studies—in the Maldives, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Bangladesh—to advance the field by offering an improved conceptual understanding and more practice‐oriented insights. It notably highlights four main dimensions to assess the risk of maladaptat...

Climate change and the related adverse impacts are among the greatest challenges facing humankind during the coming decades. Even with a significant reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, it will be inevitable for societies to adapt to new climatic conditions and associated impacts and risks. This book offers insights to first experie...

Addressing life's challenges in Cape Town's flooded shacks calls for communities and the municipality to work together, research from the African Centre for Cities has found.

Cities are starting to develop policies and plans to adapt to the impacts of climate change. As these policies and plans are implemented, the barriers and opportunities of adaptation in practice are starting to be realised. It is clear that addressing these barriers is key to achieving more systemic adaptation that is not just focused on projects b...

Municipalities represent a key opportunity for implementing local adaptation to the impacts of climate change. Most research has focused on the barriers to climate change adaptation, and little research exists that considers the conditions under which a municipality is able to initiate the process of mainstreaming climate adaptation. Through a case...

Municipalities represent a key opportunity for implementing local adaptation to the impacts of climate change. Most research has focused on the barriers to climate change adaptation, and little research exists that considers the conditions under which a municipality is able to initiate the process of mainstreaming climate adaptation. Through a case...

This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SREX) explores the challenge of understanding and managing the risks of climate extremes to advance climate change adaptation. Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. Changes in the frequency and...