 Good morning everyone, hope you enjoyed breakfast and that that keeps you awake during our exciting session Just to kick off with perhaps providing some local context For those of you who don't know about the in the slide contains some of the key Statistics that you might find in papers or reports written in our city and the detail really isn't that important But the bigger message that those facts and figures carry is and that's really the message of a Relatively large growing poor African city where they're currently the poorest of the major metropolitan areas in South Africa That's beset by a whole host of problems social inequity huge Infrastructural backlogs and yet a city that still plays a key logistics role in South Africa in the continent where the largest port and city on East Coast of Africa and all of that Development and all of the planned future development in our city, which is not insubstantial Has to occur in the middle of a biodiversity hotspot Our city is located in one of the third 34 global biodiversity hotspots So effectively what we have is a very wicked mix of problems very complex very difficult to resolve And within that particular context climate change is simply not special It's one of many problems that we as a local government have to face So how have we chosen to deal with this particular problem? Well, we initiated a municipal climate protection program in 2004 and we've really rolled that out in a phased manner on a learning by doing basis What really characterizes our work and sets it apart from the climate protection work of many other city governments around the world is a Very strong and early focus on adaptation Whereas most other city governments have focused on mitigation as their initial climate protection work and within that Adaptation work stream we have a commitment to community-based adaptation Do we have in our heads as local government when we are thinking about community-based adaptation well When we began this work We really thought about the need to empower our essentially poor communities to use their resources and their decision-making to tackle some of the impacts of climate change in the city and What does that empowerment mean? Status poor you are very much limited to building social capital But if you think about it the bulk of the world's urban poor actually occur in middle-income countries like South Africa India, Brazil, Mexico and so on and in that particular context The definition of what might constitute community-based adaptation Expands because we can anticipate the state will in fact therefore have a role and so community-based adaptation then becomes a mix of different actions and Take undertaken by different actors in those scenarios So what do we bring to this party as a local government well in the nine years we've engaged in climate protection work We've developed a climate toolbox We're capable of assessing the impacts of climate change and bringing that information to people so that they know how to respond We believe in leading by example So we've spent a lot of time and energy in developing municipal adaptation plans for some of our key sectors as local government and the key services we provide We've got a very strong focus on Ecosystem-based adaptation because of the location of our city in a global biodiversity hotspot We've obviously underlined the importance of community-based adaptation We've tested out a range of urban management tools the use of green roofs sea level rise modeling as planning tools and We've also looked at mainstreaming. We've changed our institutional structures We've used large mega projects to carry the climate message and we've worked on developing new tools that will assist local government in Incorporating climate protection into its planning So what have we learned over those nine years? Well firstly that community-based adaptation is one of a set of tools that are available to us and quite frankly There are no neat or comfortable divisions between these tools The literature makes these stark contrasts between community-based adaptation Ecosystem-based adaptation etc, and we don't find that that's the case that there's a bleeding amongst these tools We've also found that there are no recipe books for climate change adaptation despite the many guidebooks that the International agencies throw at us with five steps or ten steps quite frankly. It's a journey of discovery There is no set framework for this work and because there is no recipe You're going to end up with a number of broken eggs and you've got to be prepared for that So what has making an omelette in Durban taught us? What is what are some of the key lessons that we've taken away from this work? Well firstly beware of the international or national Consultant that arrives in your office carrying the standard recipe book approach to climate change adaptation When we first began our work the only resources that our city was unknowingly Throwing at climate change adaptation was myself working after hours and Diverting the city's biodiversity budget to fund the early climate change work And so a lot of our initial work was done through consultancies One of these consultancies looked at developing community adaptation plans. We thought it would be useful to have Community adaptation plans to parallel our municipal adaptation plans, and we did some work in two pilot communities One rural one urban we looked at livelihood analyses. What were current risks? How were communities responding? What of those responses could we use to improve local adaptive capacity? We looked at issues of food security We were particularly worried about the fact that productivity of maize, which is a key subsistence crop Appeared to decrease under climate projected futures We looked at micro scale water management and undertook a pilot project in a local school and in an unrelated Community looked at the use of community theater as a mechanism for raising awareness of climate change and climate change action and at the end of it the consultant produced this diagram, which is Fundamentally a planning diagram talk to people identify the problems put in place action plans and monitor and evaluate It is as applicable to making widgets as it is to community adaptation Planning and for those of us who worked alongside the consultancy. They really missed the big message and this was the message of adaptive capacity being undermined by disunity crime Social fragmentation and you really didn't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that this would be a key message These images unfortunately are commonplace in our city. These headlines are equally commonplace But it was only through the intervention of ourselves as the local government officials working alongside the consultant Which resulted in social cohesion being prioritized as key intervention that we would have to take forward Also be prepared for the fact that as local government one might be able to invest in Communities and build capacities, but the communities might not always come out the other end joining the climate dots We found that with our large-scale Refrostation projects we have three very large projects put in place to either partially or fully offset the carbon and ecological Footprints of two mega events that were hold in our city the soccer World Cup and cop 17 We developed these projects in conjunction with the local NGO and it's a very interesting model because we don't develop Entrepreneurs we develop tree pinnios, so Unemployed members of communities generally woman and children are taught to collect indigenous seed Which they then grow at their home and then we have community facilitators who count and measure the trees Issue credit notes that can be exchanged at tree stores for food building materials and so on We collect the trees take it to a nursery which is managed by community members who are also then responsible For planting the trees out on site The capacity of these tree pinners is built in a number of ways. We've got our embedded community facilitators We've used theater as a potential communication tool We've also got a reward system for the best performers. They taken out and exposed to other environmental projects and offered training and The largest of the reforestation projects was chosen as a light out lighthouse project at cop 17 So a project that has adaptation mitigation poverty alleviation Benefits and can be scaled up Because we are concerned about the whole issue of Offsettling we are working very hard to ensure that these projects achieve the highest international standards And they will be registered with the climate community and biodiversity Alliance But that required us to do a variety of baseline studies the social baseline study was undertaken in 2010 quite early on in the program and it confirmed that we're targeting poor and Vulnerable groups over 90% of the beneficiaries are below the country's poverty line And they are benefiting in a number of ways job creation improve food security and education and Here you can see one of the tree pinners. Her name is Tandy. We refer to this as her tree house She's just bought the sex bedroom house Using the credit notes from the trees and you can see all the trees growing around her house and Probably the most important beneficiaries of Tandy's work are her children who are now going to better schools And they assist their mother in collecting the seed and growing the trees But the social assessment not only found that there were benefits But also indicated that there were problems the tree pinners are not fully aware of why they are growing trees Only a very few of them know where the trees are going and they don't know the full rationale behind the project So we can see that there's a disjuncture there between the capacity building and the local level understanding We've also encountered what we refer to as the democracy leadership conundrum in 2009 we held the city's first climate change summit to share the work local government was doing with the broader Stakeholder community in the city out of that emerged a mandate for the establishment of broadly represented of partnership Grouping that could work on climate change in the city We began work on that in 2010. We held sector meetings. We had public meetings We put in place an advisory forum Drawn from the key sectors to help us find the right representatives in each sector to sit on an Appropriately representative steering committee and that steering committee was convened in 2011. It had disabled youth woman NGOs CBOs business and industry government everyone you could think of was represented on that steering committee But by 2012 we'd put that steering committee on ice and there were a number of reasons for that Firstly the huge level of distrust between the stakeholders the NGOs never trusted business and industry business and industry never Trusted anyone else at the table We saw also a lack of sustained motivation some of the sectoral representatives started Or stopped attending meetings quite early on and there was a lack of influential leadership coming from the sectors They had chosen people who weren't the leaders of sectors and therefore did not have the power to bring the resources of those sectors To the table so we had a complete mismatch in institutional momentum between the players and the real death knell Was we could find no legal structure in the country which would allow us as local government to sit with these stakeholders and To fund a process that would allow us to get through these teething problems. So we were totally undermined by financial regulations We also have learned to recognize the sensitivity and diversity of our cultural landscape It would seem that this would be a foregone conclusion, but it often isn't in government circles So if we look at our food security work, we were concerned about the productivity of maize We went out looking for replacement crops top of that list sweet potatoes and cassava's with cassava Definitely being the favorite crop because it's also drought resistant. What more could you wish for? Unfortunately when went into local communities with these new crops the only thing that the communities simply refused to eat was cassava They simply did not like its taste and that's not surprising because in South Africa We battled to move from white maize to yellow maize when we've got a food shortage So we can see how traditional tests could be a limitation in terms of adaptation options In terms of flood danger We found when we were working in a more tea that cultural beliefs the belief that heavy rains are brought by a giant snake in The sky known as incanyamba which is attracted to shiny surfaces that look like water We're influencing the way that communities were responding because they were covering their roofs to hide them from the snake rather than moving out of flood prone Areas so we can see that risk tolerance is influenced by cultural beliefs We also find that the importance of individuals might often be overlooked in the desire to empower the community at large If you look at our large reforestation project at before's dry The majority of families asking for school fees to be paid are the result of this woman's actions Nini Gubashi who's passionate about education in her community and she's become the driving force We've also encountered what we find to be the false community ecosystem divide Certainly in Africa if mitigation is about carbon then adaptation is about people and ecosystems Those are our communities twin strengths We've brought these two concepts together in the seabed ocean community ecosystem based adaptation which we profiled at COP 17 really seeking ways to Unite communities in the ecosystems that underwrite their livelihoods in a ways that creates job creation and allows Communities become more active around improving their communities making them greener and cleaner We're aware that this could contribute a sector to our emerging green economy But also aware of the urban premium of ecosystem based adaptation land and ecosystems are very costly to maintain in urban areas Also, don't overlook the opportunity for the local to influence the global We've got a scenario where global policy is believed to influence local action Well in hosting COP 17 we use the opportunity to convene a local government convention The product of that was the first organized commitment by local government to adaptation known as the Durban adaptation charter and within that We embedded the importance of community based adaptation What are some of our overlooked challenges very briefly the need to engage groups other than the poor? We're finding mal adaptation appearing in our well-to-do residents For example this person protecting their property and in so doing really increasing the risk of storm surge on adjacent properties We also need to engage broader groups business and traditional leadership That's particularly important in our city two-thirds of our city is rural and under tribal leadership. Thanks very much