City to city learning and knowledge exchange for climate resilience in southern Africa

1). Thus, this approach provided the opportunity for us to single out best- and worst-case sce- narios and in this way draw out lessons, good practices, failures and to evaluate the process of learning in the context of climate resilience across the cities. This effectively helped to answer the research questions on outlining issues in the study cities including good practices and examining the usefulness of city learning across the region for building resilience. Results Key issues in the urban ecosystems A suite of risks that are impeding sound service delivery in the four cities were identified in the workshops and city learning labs during the identification of city key issues (see Table 2). Chief among these were water security as a key risk of climate change. We also identified dynamics of water and solid waste; informal settlements; energy; water governance; and cli- mate change planning and policy integration as presenting both problems and solutions across the cities. We present brief descriptions of the cities and summaries of key issues identified through desktop studies and during the city exchanges in order to provide city-specific con- texts and as obtained from the sources of data shown in Table 1. Harare. The Zimbabwean capital is situated in the north-eastern part of the country. Inadequate supply of potable water was a key issue for the city. Zimbabwe is divided into seven river catchments as a way of decentralizing water provision. Harare falls under the Upper Manyame Catchment with Lake Chivero, an artificial reservoir that was built in the 1950s situ-

ated downstream of the city, being the city’s main raw water source. The Zimbabwe National Water Authority (ZINWA) is responsible for maintenance of all surface water bodies such as dams as well as underground water resources across the country, whilst city councils such as Harare City Council (HCC) are responsible for provision of potable water to all residents as stipulated by the Urban Councils Acts. HCC purchases raw water from ZINWA and then treats and distributes it to residents and industries. It is noteworthy that the two entities (ZINWA and HCC) are housed under different ministries and this presents challenges in the governance of and provision of water for the city. ZINWA is housed under the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Water, Climate and Rural settlement whereas HCC is housed under the Ministry of Local Government and National Housing. With a population of 1.6 (2.8 in the metropolitan area) million, Harare is the industrial hub of the country. During the co-design processes of the FRACTAL project, stakeholders identi- fied potable water supply as the major key issue followed by wetlands degradation and water governance (see Table 2) showing that there are grave concerns around issues to do with water in the city. Urban agriculture, which draws a substantial amount of water for production through irrigation particularly in the form of horticulture is practiced to a large extent in and around the city. The city has aged water and sanitation infrastructure which is expensive to

maintain. Because the city is located upstream of its catchment, partially treated wastewater, together with pollutants from industries and agriculture ends up being washed into the main water source for the city, Lake Chivero [60]. Climate-induced impacts such as reduced avail- ability of rainwater during drought and dry spells or in the opposing and extreme case, flood- ing exacerbate challenges of access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene and further lessen the city’s capacity to provide potable water, given its already limited capacity. Contested development in an almost unregulated manner is leading to the degradation of wetlands in the city. This is a real challenge as it threatens the city’s water catchment processes. Another challenge in Harare and the nation is of energy supply which, like raw water is gener- ated from external sources far from the city and is also distributed at national and not at city level. There is a nexus between climate (rainfall), water and energy which is mostly wood City learning in southern Africa PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227915 January 24, 2020 10 / 25