Adapting to climate change

Climate adaptation is not primarily a technical problem that can be solved with information alone. It’s a social, political and developmental process. Transformative climate adaptation requires understanding vulnerability, navigating trade-offs across scales and bringing different capacities and knowledge together to effect change.

Professor Gina Ziervogel, the director of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI), based in the Faculy of Science, shared these sentiments as she started her inaugural lecture on Wednesday, 12 August. But before she reached the podium, the host for the evening, UCT Vice-Chancellor Professor Mosa Moshabela, welcomed the audience. He said inaugural lectures are an opportune moment to pause and celebrate the achievements of scholars whose work expanded and extended knowledge, influenced thinking and contributed meaningfully to society.

“Inaugural lectures also remind us that universities exist not only to generate new ideas but, very importantly, share these ideas. We have to debate them and apply them in ways that can make our world a better place,” Professor Moshabela said.

Understanding vulnerability

Professor Ziervogel’s lecture was titled: “Water under or over the bridge: Governing trade-offs in climate adaptation” and took place in a packed Neville Alexander building auditorium on lower campus. The audience included her loved ones, colleagues and friends, as well as her students.

“The question that brings me here is: How might we best adapt to climate change while meeting our various needs? And by climate adaptation, I mean, how do we reduce the impact of climate stresses and shocks?” she asked.

“Could climate information help people prepare for climate variability and reduce their vulnerability?”

Touching on the title of her lecture, Ziervogel said for water to flow under the bridge, understanding society’s vulnerability is step one. She used her PhD fieldwork studies in Lesotho as an example. At the start of the research, she said, she quickly realised that her participants had never used the seasonal climate forecast they received. Therefore, the one-on-one interviews she arranged to have with them to establish its value were futile. So, she brushed up on her participatory method skills and designed activities where farmers mapped out their seasonal calendar and used roleplay to act out three imaginary years with different forecasts. This approach, she added, helped participants unpack what and when to plant, how to water their crops and what to do with their livestock.

“Could climate information help people prepare for climate variability and reduce their vulnerability? Vulnerability was only beginning to emerge as a key concept in climate research. My supervisor, Tom Downing, encouraged me to think beyond hazards, to look at how exposure, sensitivity, and the capacity to respond, shaped people’s vulnerability and experience on climate impacts,” she said.

An ‘applied’ academic

During her presentation, Ziervogel also spent some time touching on the important role transdisciplinary work plays in climate adaption.

She said while working with the Western Cape Water Caucus and colleagues at the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG) on a project, which explored ways to gather knowledge and information about community water challenges, a comment by an EMG colleague made her reflect on the kind of academic she has become.

“The caucus wanted to build their own research skills, so that their advocacy could rest on more than individual testimony. Thabo [an EMG colleague] said: ‘Gina, the problem with you is you are both our funder and our friend’. He was not complaining and he was not letting me off either. He was naming something that transdisciplinary work makes harder to see,” she said. “I held the money, and because we worked in a language of partnership, co-production and shared problems, it can be hard to acknowledge.”

Over the years, Ziervogel has witnessed the value of transdisciplinary work in her field and has moved from being a reluctant academic to an applied academic.

“I work alongside academics from other disciplines and societal actors to define problems jointly, generate knowledge together and look for what might work. That was never simply a methodological choice. It was an admission that many of the most important insights about climate risk sit outside the academy,” she said.

‘All knowledge is welcome’

Staying with transdisciplinary work, Ziervogel then referenced a research project – carried out in partnership with various role-players including academia and civil society – that demonstrates its value. The project, Tuwe Pamoja, currently on the go, explores how nature-based solutions can reduce flood risks in informal settlements. It also uses community voices to solicit answers to pertinent questions.

Interestingly, she said, the project did not kick off with a conversation on climate risk. Instead, residents started by highlighting the impact climate change has on their everyday lives and placed emphasis on their priority focus areas. Khayelitsha residents’ stories, Ziervogel said, were particularly hard to hear and the solutions to their challenges are complex.

“This reinforced a finding that runs through my work. Climate interventions succeed when they align with what people value and when they sit inside broader development processes rather than beside them, which is why I’ve come to believe that all knowledge should be welcome here,” she said. “But bringing knowledge together across genuinely different ways of understanding the world is harder than it sounds. But when it’s done well and leads to real improvement in people’s lives, it can be transformative.”

Difficult work

As she concluded her lecture, Ziervogel told the audience that progress on climate has been slow in South Africa. This, she explained, is due to various complexities.

“Working across temporal and spatial scales are genuinely hard. We treat adaptation as an environmental problem when it is a social and political one too. And partly [because] investing now against so many other urgent priorities is a difficult thing to ask,” she said.

Ziervogel stressed that reducing emissions must happen urgently, and everyone has a role to play in the process. Every South African, she added, must hold government accountable.

“Climate change will keep testing our institutions, our relationships and our imagination. If you work in government, ask who was not in the room when the rules were written. If you’re a practitioner, be willing to have your plan changed by the people it is for. If you’re a student, learn how to listen to people who see the world differently from you,” she said.

“It is difficult work. We do not always get it right. But we will keep doing it.”

Watch the inaugural lecture.