Water and Climate Change in Africa

Challenges and Community Initiatives in Durban, Maputo and Nairobi

Patricia E. Perkins, Patricia E. Perkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136773198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

In the coming decades, countries around the world will face increasingly severe challenges related to global climate change. While the details vary from country to country, the impacts will be especially grave for marginalized people, whose access to food, potable water, and safe shelter may be threatened due to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature, and to extreme weather events. Because weather extremes are the main way that climate change manifests itself, water governance is a crucial aspect of climate change resilience.

Following an overview of the ways climate change is affecting three cities in Africa, Water and Climate Change in Africa: Challenges and Community Initiatives in Durban, Maputo and Nairobi discusses the equity and climate justice implications, and then gives examples of ways in which a range of local community organizations are extending their current activities to address these challenges through innovative new programs and initiatives at the grassroots. This approach has implications for communities worldwide; it is a process of building on existing organizations' aptitudes and strengths in the light of local knowledge of climate challenges, and creating partnerships to build equity-enhancing new methods of protecting people's subsistence.

This book should be of interest to climate change scholars, activists and policy-makers, as well as development studies researchers and practitioners.

1 Introduction

The importance of community-based organizations for equitable water governance in times of climate change

Patricia E. Perkins

Climate change affects all of us, wherever on Earth we live. Weather is changing and storms are increasing in intensity, stressing agriculture and infrastructure. As carbon dioxide and other gases emitted by burning fossil fuels cause the earth to heat up, more water evaporates into the atmosphere, and the sun’s heat, caught in the thickening atmosphere, drives powerful winds and weather cells, causing droughts, storms and floods more extreme than humans have ever witnessed before.

International strategies for addressing climate change are in disarray. Even if a global consensus had been reached on the United Nations Kyoto Protocol, and its provisions had been implemented and had succeeded in reducing global carbon emissions to 1990 levels, global temperatures would still have risen at least 2 °C, meaning that much of Bangladesh, Florida, Manhattan, and many small island nations, could be underwater by 2050. But the Kyoto Protocol was not agreed upon; the wealthy nations which have benefited from fossil fuel based economic growth over the past 200 years refuse to reduce their consumption, and the surging growth in the rest of the world also requires fossil fuels to maintain its impetus. It now appears certain that global temperatures will rise by at least 3 °C. The complicated financial and carbon-trading mechanisms promoted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the World Bank, and other global institutions are far too bureaucratic, weak, internally-inconsistent, and far-fetched to represent meaningful solutions to climate change. And the housing, health, and livelihoods of marginalized people worldwide are already being threatened by climate- change- related impacts.

This means that the marginalized in every community have both the necessity and the means to take direct action. Their lived experience gives them expertise in how priorities should be set to address climate change. Their knowledge and views must be part of local, regional, national, and international governance—including urban planning and housing, water management, infrastructure, agriculture, health, and finance policies. Women’s special knowledge, in particular, is crucial, because of women’s socially-constructed responsibilities throughout the world for fetching water, cooking, cleaning, agriculture, healthcare, and maintaining housing—all water-dependent activities. Given the immediacy of humanity’s common climate problem, and the shortage of resources to address it, we must address these challenges efficiently and develop resilience to face them—at the community level.

What are some of the challenges that low and middle-income countries face as a result of climate change?

(M)ost of the world’s urban population live in cities or smaller urban centres ill-equipped for adaptation—with weak and ineffective local governments and with very inadequate provision for the infrastructure and services needed to reduce climate-change- related risks and vulnerabilities. A key part of adaptation concerns infrastructure and buildings—but much of the urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America have no infrastructure to adapt—no all-weather roads, piped water supplies or drains—and live in poor-quality housing in floodplains or on slopes at risk of landslides. Most international agencies have long refused to support urban programmes, especially those that address these problems.

(Satterthwaite et al. 2007: vi)

The World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) review of the scientific literature on climate change impacts in East Africa underscores the importance of changes in precipitation and weather, sea-level rise, water availability, and other water-related problems, and states that, “Climate change impacts have the potential to undermine and even undo progress made in improving the socio-economic well-being of East Africans. . . . For every USD$1 spent preparing for disaster, USD$7 is spent recovering from disaster” (WWF 2006: 1 and 9). The equity implications of climate change impacts are underscored in a third recent report which addresses urban flooding and the rights of the urban poor in Africa:

Climate change will increase the vulnerability of the urban poor throughout Africa. . . . The management of localized flooding due to inadequate drainage should be undertaken by local communities themselves. . . . Local voluntary groups, assisted by national or international NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and with support from both local government and national disaster reduction organisations, could be highly effective. . . . Local authorities are (also) best placed to cope with flooding from small streams whose catchment areas lie almost entirely within the builtup area. . . . Poor people’s participation is a must.

(ActionAid 2006: 2 and 6)

In the coming years, countries around the world will face increasingly severe problems stemming from global climate change. While the details vary from place to place, the impacts are especially grave for marginalized people, whose access to food, drinking water, and safe shelter is most often threatened due to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature, and to extreme weather events. Climate change thus worsens problems related to poverty and inequality, which persist everywhere despite decades of “sustainable development” programming.

Climate change adaptation cannot be standardized. The details of each particular community’s situation—ecological, social, political— affect its own priorities. How does each community organize socially and politically to meet the material and weather-related changes that affect people’s livelihoods? How are the needs of the most vulnerable addressed in local communities? The chapters in this book describe how civil society organizations (CSOs) which are already working in low-income neighbourhoods can incorporate climate change education and adaptation into their activities. University students, by working as interns with the CSOs, can learn how to do community outreach and share their academic knowledge, while helping the CSOs to document their organizing initiatives and workshops. When local CSOs have connections within universities, this strengthens them politically and builds communication channels between vulnerable people—the experts on climate change impacts—and government officials who are responsible for developing climate adaptation policies.

The goal of this book is to contribute to a “bottom-up” response to climate change by describing and demonstrating how community- based climate change strategies can be initiated, and how international collaboration can strengthen and foster such grassroots initiatives. Thus, this is an action-oriented book about the process of climate change response and adaptation, starting in local communities.

Climate change and water governance in Durban, Maputo, and Nairobi

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability. This vulnerability is exacerbated by existing developmental challenges such as endemic poverty, limited access to capital, ecosystem degradation, and complex disasters and conflicts” (IPCC 2007). Income inequality in South Africa, Mozambique, and Kenya is among the largest in the world; in all three countries, equity struggles related to water are growing in social, political, and ecological significance, which is both a symptom and a cause of urban vulnerabilities related to climate change.

In Maputo, Mozambique, climate change is causing coastal erosion and periodic flooding along scenic coastal roadways; saltwater intrusion, wind erosion, and desertification in urban food-producing areas; flooding in coastal slum areas; degradation of water quality in wells and potable water scarcity; and the destruction of mangroves and threats to the locally-important shrimp fishery. There are clear signs that the sea level is rising, which has led to the need for expensive coastal management efforts in Maputo municipality. On three offshore islands mangroves are disappearing, water quality is declining, and desertification and erosion are increasing (UN Habitat 2010: 2). The United Nations Habitat Cities and Climate Change Initiative, which has begun a pilot project in Maputo, emphasizes local government capacity-building, policy dialogue, climate change awareness, public education, and developing coordination mechanisms between all levels of government as priorities to help address these risks. Mozambique’s national water law (1991) considers all water as state-owned, to be governed by the state for the benefit of the population, with water access for people, sustainability, and stakeholder participation as priorities. Four water basin committees have been established in Mozambique, with seats for civil society representatives.

As in Mozambique, South Africa is implementing watershed committees or “catchment management agencies” (CMAs) to decentralize decision-making and create a framework for integrating the needs of all stakeholders in water governance. Durban’s municipal government has already developed a local climate change adaptation strategy; like Maputo, Durban faces coastal floods and storm surges related to sea- level rise, hotter temperatures and heat waves, changed rainfall and storm patterns, slum flooding and reduced drinking water supplies due to climate change. Environmental education and confidence-building are recognized as crucial needs; for example, the Inkomati CMA has initiated outreach programmes targeting rural poor, emerging farmers, women, and youth. Grounded participatory research leading to accessible public education and responsive community-based programmes with CSOs are needed to help address these significant water governance challenges. This type of action research is well developed in Durban, partly due to the work of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and its partner CSOs.

In Nairobi, severe infrastructure needs are being exacerbated by water supply fluctuations and slum flooding related to climate change. Just as in Maputo and Durban, environmental awareness and education leading to more equitable governance processes are needed. As noted by the Kenyan delegation to the 2006 UN conference on climate change in Nairobi, Kenya’s adaptation focuses include education, good governance, human resources development and training, institutional capacity building and management change, public finance improvement, and better national resources management. Nairobi, one of the largest and most complex cities in the world, provides a challenging arena for participatory governance research.

Democratic mediation of equity conflicts related to water, and sustainable long-term management of water resources in the face of climate change, requires public participation, in particular by low- income marginalized women—the experts. But many people’s lack of awareness of how water governance institutions function, and inability to participate for a range of reasons, mean that low-income people are nearly always underrepresented.

“Strengthening the role of civil society in water sector governance towards climate change adaptation in African cities—Durban, Maputo, Nairobi” is a three-year project linking African CSO and university-based partners in these three cities. Its goal is to improve watershed governance for climate change adaptation and enhance resilience and adaptive capacity of vulnerable and marginalized groups, especially women, by developing methods for strengthening the voices of marginalized people and especially women in water governance and linking communities with other water actors to help bridge the knowledge gap in local water management and enhance a broader social perspective on water, climate change, and sustainability.

This project, which started in 2010, is supported by the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) programme—a joint initiative of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). This project’s methodology includes collaboration between students, NGOs, and academics as well as community-based research and environmental education. Project partners based in universities and several NGOs in Nairobi, Maputo, and Durban are working together to achieve the following objectives:

• To characterize the institutional framework for urban water governance in the three cities, and explain how different actors within this framework cope with climate change and variability.

• To identify and test viable alternatives for enhancing civil society’s role towards adaptation to climate change and variability by vulnerable groups (e.g. by developing education, training, and awareness programmes).

• To share widely the knowledge generated for potential adoption by other cities in Africa.

The project is being implemented by the following community- based NGOs in Africa: Kilimanjaro Initiative (KI) and Kenya Debt Relief Network (KENDREN) in Nairobi; Women, Gender and Development (MuGeDe) and Justiça Ambiental (JA) in Maputo; and Umphilo waManzi (Water for Life) and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) in Durban. The University of Nairobi (Nairobi), Eduardo Mondlane University (Maputo), the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban), and the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada provide academic research coordination and student supervision for this project. Their chapters in this book describe the starting-points for all of these partner organizations in their approaches to climate change-related work.

Participatory climate change awareness-building

In general, all the partners share a commitment to focusing on low- income areas of each city; these tend to be most severely affected by periodic flooding and other climate change impacts. Residents of low- income areas often lack the ability to protect themselves against the impacts of extreme weather events. The project includes training and research sponsorship for students and faculty in the partner universities; support for community-based research, workshops in low-income communities and secondary schools, curriculum and materials development, and skills development within the partner NGOs; training of environmental educators and organizers; contributions to the pool of experienced and qualified community workers in each country; strengthening of all the partner institutions’ capabilities to carry out international projects; and contributions to the international literature and professional knowledge concerning water issues, environmental education techniques, and community organizing for improved civil society involvement in governance. The networks being built extend from local and community-based linkages through regional and national-level policy groupings to international academic and policy networks on civil society, watershed management, and governance.

The political process of climate change policy development and implementation depends on the interchange between civil society groups, researchers generating information on current realities, and government. We are attempting to challenge the conventional notion that only educational institutions “produce” knowledge. Understanding community needs and what helps particular civil society groups to see and act to strengthen their role in democratic governance, for example, is something in which community organizations and CSOs have eminent expertise. This collaborative approach, also known as participatory action research (PAR), is broadly defined as “research by, with, and for people affected by a particular problem, which takes place in collaboration with academic researchers. It seeks to democratize knowledge production and foster opportunities for empowerment by those involved” (Kindon et al. 2008: 90).

Partnerships between academics and non-academics can be especially productive and effective. This type of partnership encourages and allows the partner CSOs to reflect on and analyze their activities and to document “learning” more systematically than they are often able to do, by bringing student researchers into the CSOs as collaborators/interns. It also encourages universities to be more pragmatic about teaching and research, and to “field-test” approaches towards community organization, equity, and popular education. Students committed to the project’s goals of supporting participatory engagement by local people in municipal water decision-making are given practical opportunities to develop their skills, as a way of hastening each city’s climate change preparedness.

The integration and meaningful participation of women in formal decision-making processes is especially important in times of climate change, given women’s gendered responsibilities for household food, fuel, and water provision as well as healthcare, childcare, elder care, and community supports. This requires attention to women’s adaptive capacity and special supports for women’s resilience and ability to cope with climate change.

Specific examples of how climate change responses combine well with gender-aware community organizing, all of which are now underway, include the following:

• The KI, a youth-focused NGO, has upgraded a sports field in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, on the banks of the Nairobi River, which will prevent housing from being flooded during extreme weather events. In addition, KI organizes community forums on sustainable water management and environmental education, as well as community and river clean-ups. Young women’s leadership is central to their organizing. (See chapter 4.)

• In Durban, women activists from Umphilo waManzi and the SDCEA coordinate “learning journeys” where government officials visit low-income neighbourhoods to hear a...