Water and Fire: Enhancing capacity and reducing risk through 15 'Best Bets' for transformative adaptation with vulnerable residents on the Cape Flats

South Africa's township residents are beset with legacy economic and social challenges of apartheid, poverty, and constrained development opportunities. The scale of this challenge is heightened by migration to cities, and rapid, extensive growth of formal and informal settlements, which are extremely susceptible to environmental risks. Climate change has exacerbated the risk of disasters as these destructive events have increased in severity and frequency. Urban densification, infrastructural collapse, poor post-apartheid governance, as well as mistrust between marginalised communities and state actors has compounded the effects of environmental disasters. Disenfranchised groups, including migrants, unemployed youth, the elderly, and ethnic and linguistic minorities are most at risk of the direct, indirect, immediate and systemic harms of such events, especially as they are intimately and complexly interwoven with structural oppressions, such as poverty, gender discrimination, racism, violence, and political alienation. Infrastructural collapse and emergency or disaster response services to township fire-outbreaks and water-shortages have been met with violence, where breakdown in trust between different levels of government, public services, and township residents have frequently provoked outrage. Three escalating environmental hazards disproportionately and differentially impact on excluded communities on the Cape Flats of Cape Town, South Africa. These are recurrent large-scale fires, widespread water shortages and in-access, and large-scale flooding. To mitigate the social impacts of disasters related to water and fire, and to meet the justice and inclusion priorities of the UN SDGs and UNISDR Sendai Framework priorities of 'build back better', risk-affected communities need to be supported to lead policy and practice changes to reduce these risks

The project draws on themes of water and fire to bring disaster risk management to sustainable development by building local capacity in directing decisions for responses to environmental hazards that most affect the marginalised. In an age of government austerity and economic strain, township residents have been forced to become increasingly self-reliant and resourceful. The project will supportively mobilise local knowledges to mitigate disaster by prioritising coproduced, cooperative strategies. These may include coactivation of practical community-driven programmes, but also bottom-up policy strategy development to effectively respond to environmental disasters. We will engage democratic and creative participatory methods to mobilise the lived experiences of affected residents as primary evidence to challenge current disaster management processes and promote community-based resilience actions.
Through the systematic co-development of a set of resilience actions, this project will directly benefit risk-affected communities in their efforts to mitigate disaster risks and achieve sustainable livelihoods. These resilience actions include collaborative partnership with risk-affected communities to: assemble local knowledge drawn from residents' lived experiences to mitigate risks; engage indigenous democratic processes and creative interventions to mobilise local knowledge towards proactive responses to disaster risks; mobilise local knowledge to codevelop a set of agreed 15 "Best Bets" as shared, practical resilience actions to help reduce disaster risks; develop these 15 "Best Bets" into a community-driven policy strategy for disaster risk reduction; in the process, create a democratic framework for codeveloping policy strategies and community resilience actions to reduce disaster risks in affected communities. Planned activities will include legkotlas, indabas, community mapping activities, digital story-telling, and public engagement events to showcase creative and useable products of the community-driven engagement process, thus increasing positive societal impact.

Academic partners:
Internal funding from UoS allowed PI to travel to SA to set up a collaboration between relevant academic partners. The Proposal was codeveloped between UoS and the 3 SA institutions and built on existing knowledge of the situated context of marginalised communities in South Africa, specifically the Cape Flats. It drew on existing alliances and strategic interventions based on reciprocal links with marginalised communities. The proposed project therefore had user benefits at the core of its conception and intentions, with vulnerable communities being the primary intended beneficiaries, with other marginalised communities, academics, state actors, charities, civil service organisations, other relevant groups being secondary beneficiaries. The proposal opens up opportunities for further strategic alliances with civil society groups, development agencies, and intergovernmental stakeholders.

As host institution of the project, and home to an Extreme Events Research Group, the UoS will benefit from democratic and creative approaches to engaging with and negotiating potential adaptations and solutions to climate change-related impacts. The UoS will benefit by learning from its Global South partners, with their extensive knowledge and experience in context and with emphasis on collaborations with informal settlement communities and indigenous populations. By bringing this partnership together with existing expertise in SA, the UoS will codevelop a new international evidence base and enhance existing practices around environmental disaster challenges. While these challenges are specific to water shortages, flooding and rapid large-scale township fires, they represent critical environmental disaster themes from which resilience and disaster-risk stakeholders may benefit more generally. This will ultimately benefit disaster-affected communities as these critical disaster themes increase in impact in developing world contexts and globally.

Similarly, the academic partners in South Africa, UCT and UWC will engage with researchers, and key stakeholders in the UK and share learning and research experience from this project in co-created engagement activities and events. The project will provide SLF, the project's highly-respected community research partner, with the opportunity to enhance their field work, connections, and researcher experience in informal settlements. The project will also provide valuable early career development to 3 PDRAs in both countries and expose them to innovative research and stakeholder engagement practices in indigenous communities.

Local Government and Informal settlement stakeholders:
The project calls for consultative dialogue between vulnerable communities and local government stakeholders in CT around problems of disaster risks associated with water and fire affecting susceptible residents of townships. This engagement could provide a basis for democratic engagement with these communities in valuing their local knowledge and coproducing policy. This engagement will enable local government officials and the communities to codevelop resilience solutions to these crises that are practical and robust, whilst at the same time delivering appropriate, socially-just benefits to the most vulnerable.

Policy, Practice, Activist, and Third Sector Communities:
These stakeholders in SA, the UK, and worldwide are potential beneficiaries through understanding and developing methods and practical actions that effectively allow them to negotiate disaster and environmental adaptations with disaster-affected communities, and to codevelop transformative resilience actions. All beneficiaries described above will benefit from shared networks, where academic, community, and local government expertise is brought together in new and creative ways to engage with pressing issues and codevelop new ways of communicating, solving common challenges, and creating new research opportunities.