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 # 8 – Urban Heat: Cities Taking Action

Cities are heating up at twice the rate of global average warming due to the urban heat island effect and rapid urbanization. With more cities facing record high temperatures and heatwaves increasing in number, it is important that we set an agenda to take collective action now making sure to View More

From Asset Resilience to Resilient Places and Communities

City governments have multiple conflicting priorities related to shifting macro-economic trends and climate change while also creating safe and livable places for urban communities and businesses. The increasing frequency and intensity of climate disaster risks emphasizes the need for a resilience approach. City institutions and organizations are increasingly adopting a View More

CitiesXChange: Resilient Recovery by SMEs in Southeast Asia

In Southeast Asia, six member cities of the Resilient Cities Network (R-Cities) are exploring ways to support their local economy recover in a way that actions and projects will simultaneously address wider resilience and climate challenges. View More

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

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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