City Water Resilience in Africa

Program Objective

As climate risks continue to increase, access to water has become the defining challenge of our times. Whether challenged by too much, too little or poor-quality water, City leaders in Africa face converging challenges of extending water and sanitation services for rapidly growing and urbanizing populations, managing watershed risks often largely outside city jurisdictions, and designing for climate resilience.

Program Approach

The work involves creating City Characterisation Reports for Addis Ababa and Kigali, together with completing a multi-stakeholder assessment and visioning workshops. From this each City will prepare its City Water Resilience Profile and Action Plan. Documentation is available online for previous cities that have applied the CWRA at various stages. The aim is to build a knowledge base for other cities to access for comparison and insight by sharing all materials.

This program is designed using the CWRA methodology and assessment framework as well as the Our Water governance mapping tool. It incorporates other spatial planning tools and frameworks developed by WRI that allow city-regions to identify, quantify and locate urban water risks (e.g. the Aqueduct database).

This approach supports taking a comprehensive systems perspective to urban water resilience to inform an integrated ‘one water’ approach that supports the health and wellbeing of the community and protects the natural water cycle. The CWRA at its core helps assess the resilience of the water system a city depends on and includes upstream and downstream catchment issues.

Facts

cities with over 3 million residents face extremely high water stress by 2030^[1]

2.1B

people live without readily available, safe water at home^[2]

decline in GDP could be seen in water scarce regions by 2050 as a result of climate change^[3]

Partners

Resources

CITY WATER RESILIENCE ASSESSMENT – ADDIS ABABA

Addis Ababa’s economy is growing as the city is undergoing a rapid urban transformation. City leaders recognize that the city needs to not only build its capacity to respond and recover from water-related shocks and stresses but also change its relationship with water to create an environment for the city to thrive.

Read Assessment

Program Resources

Speaker Series #7 – Creating Resilient Cities – The Role of Play in Planning

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on children, disrupting their schooling, affecting their well-being, social contact, and even nutrition. This is especially damaging for children living in deprived urban areas, increasing the risk of poverty given the accumulated disadvantages. With the objective of reclaiming play in cities and View More

What do cities need to become net zero? Read the new report from our NetZeroCities program

Cities in Europe say improved systems, approaches and resourcing are required to achieve climate neutrality, according to a new report published by Resilient Cities Network (R-Cities) and partners at NetZeroCities. View More

Speaker Series #6 – From Theory to Practice: Partnerships to Fund Resilience Implementation

With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas, a number that is expected to reach 70 percent by 2050, urgent action is required to ensure our cities can withstand the effects of multiple shocks and stresses. Business-as-usual models of siloed and reactive planning do not provide View More

Making Climate Risk Assessments Accessible

Cities across the world are beginning to recognize the need to adapt to climate change. But the task can often feel so large, varied and wide-ranging that a common question we hear is: “Well, where do I even begin?” View More

Speaker Series #5 – Aligning Infrastructure for Resilience

Infrastructure increasingly plays a complex role in supporting resilience; however, there is a multitude of organizations that control critical infrastructure in cities. In addition, there is often a lack of collaboration across national, state, and local organizations that limits our understanding and ability to address and mitigate risks. This emphasizes View More

Speaker Series #4 – Resilient Health Systems

Two years after the start of the pandemic, the virus is not yet considered endemic, but communities across the world have had to address health system crisis, gaps and innovations to be able to live with the virus circulating, as well as other healthcare related challenges. In this fourth Cities View More

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[1] https://www.wri.org/aqueduct
[2] https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018/executive-summary/#
[3] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/publication/high-and-dry-climate-change-water-and-the-economy

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City Water Resilience in Africa

Tags: Program, Resilience, Water and Sanitation

City Water Resilience in Africa

City Water Resilience in Africa