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

influence climate adaptation interventions and stimulate behaviour change among citizens and businesses. Adaptation measures are needed in this and many cities in the region given projections of population exponential population growth. The differing contexts of water governance demonstrated for the four cities of Harare, Windhoek, Lusaka and Durban are an example of the use of diverse solutions within African cities. Often, one size fits all solutions are advocated for and sometimes even funded for Africa, forgetting the different contextual realities. However, we acknowledge that there is still room for cities to learn from each other on implementation in order to improve on water service delivery and water resource management. Multiple actors, often through partnership, tend to intervene in urban climate change governance [81]; [82]. This suggests the use of new frame- works such as the Resilience City Planning Framework (RCPF), which is a network of inter- linked multidisciplinary concepts. At the same time, governance systems in the cities need to be transparent, flexible, have integration and monitoring systems, and embrace continual learning and knowledge sharing to increase the likelihood of transformational adaptation. City climate integration and planning. By engaging in compact partnerships for Durban with neighbouring municipalities, learning, resources and skills are shared and an integrated response to climate change has been developed in this city-region. This increases the scale at

which work is done, often encapsulating whole catchments and substantially increasing the number of benefiting city-region residents. Lessons and good practice therefore emanated from Durban in the way in which climate change is integrated in planning processes and cli- mate adaptation is facilitated. The structures and approaches in Durban present learning point as such efforts of integrating climate action into policy can be replicated in other southern African cities. It is worth noting though that similar efforts such as the development of Wind- hoek’s climate change response strategy; Lusaka’s water security initiative and some engage- ments on improving planning and mainstreaming national and transformative adaptation plans at the city level in Harare are all initiatives that have been borne partly from the FRAC- TAL engagements and from the learning experiences of the city exchanges. Conclusion Cities can be regarded as complex urban ecosystems, which, like other types of ecosystems, are threatened by climate change. Additionally, southern African cities face multiple stressors and complex challenges. As with natural ecosystems, resilience against climate change lies firstly in the healthy functioning of the city and secondly in the ability of the city to adapt to changes. A crucial element in adapting is having the ability to learn and implement best practices, often from other cities facing similar challenges. As indicated in this paper, some cities have come up with innovative ways of tackling challenges such as water insecurity, informal settlements

and climate change. These provide learning points for other cities that are grappling with cli- mate change and other, similar developmental issues, also bearing in mind that context mat- ters. In this paper we identified five elements (called ‘city learning points’) of a city that need to be considered when grappling with and building resilience to climate change impacts in south- ern African cities. Among these learning points are the issue of public-private partnerships, which southern African cities can embrace in dealing with issues such as water scarcity and management issues and where great strides in improving water service delivery to the city resi- dents through water reclamation, have been made in the case of the City of Windhoek. This has placed the city on a success trajectory, which promises to lessen water availability issues that are compounded by climatic risks. Another learning point was that community engagement and inclusion to deal more suc- cessfully with solid waste allows for local participation and green job creation in cities as City learning in southern Africa PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227915 January 24, 2020 19 / 25