Water and Climate Change in Africa: Challenges and Community Initiatives in Durban, Maputo and Nairobi

by Perkins; Patricia E.

• ISBN13: 9780415822039
• ISBN10: 0415822033
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-05-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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. International strategies for addressing climate change are in disarray. The complicated financial and carbon-trading mechanisms promoted by the United Nations and other global institutions are far too bureaucratic, weak, internally-inconsistent, and scattered to represent meaningful solutions to climate change. The focus of this book is how to initiate bottom-up strategies for addressing climate change challenges. The details of each particular community's situation ecological, social, political are crucial for this type of approach. How can communities organize socially and politically to meet biophysical and weather-related changes that affect their livelihoods? How are the needs of the most vulnerable addressed? This book demonstrates the methodology of a grassroots approach to climate change adaptation and response. Following an overview of the ways climate change is affecting three cities in Africa, this book 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.