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Smallholder farming in much of Sub-Saharan Africa is rain-fed and thus exposed to rainfall variability. Among the climate variables, rainfall is projected to decline and have an overriding effect on crop productivity. With little opportunity for supplementary irrigation for the majority of farmers, a plausible strategy to maintain crop production under water-limited conditions includes balanced nutrient management for enhancing efficiency of use of limited soil water. Co-application of judicious rates of organic and mineral nutrient resources, particularly including the use of phosphorus (P) on P-limited soils, will facilitate development of an extensive crop rooting system for efficient exploration and capture of soil water, especially at a depth > 0.8 m. This chapter explores case studies across Eastern and Southern Africa where various soil water conservation and nutrient management approaches have been used to gain ‘extra miles’ with limited available soil water. Firstly, an approach is described that varies nitrogen (N) fertilizer application across growing seasons, by adjusting N application rates to match current season rainfall trends. The approach offers opportunities for farmers to increase crop productivity to > 6 t ha-1 in high agro-potential areas, compared to a ceiling of 4.5 t ha-1 for the fixed fertilization model, while minimizing economic losses due to investments in N fertilizer during drought years. Secondly, we deal with the subject of fertilization across nutrient gradients, where a poor agronomic N use efficiency of < 18 kg grain kg-1 of applied N is demonstrated for soils with < 0.4% organic carbon, compared with > 35 kg grain kg-1 of N applied when soil organic carbon > 0.5%. Thirdly, the conservation agriculture (CA)-nutrient management nexus is examined, where maize yields in farmers’ fields with CA alone were barely 0.5 t ha-1 compared to an average of 2.5 t ha-1 for CA combined with fertilizers. Fourthly, a novel system that involves intercropping two legumes with contrasting phenology for enhanced cropping system functioning is described. Finally, an approach that can be used for co-learning with farmers on soil fertility management principles for risk management is presented. The data lead to the conclusion that the ‘doubled-up’ legumes system results in reduced fertilizer requirements for cereal crops grown in sequence, which benefits yield stability over time. Variable use of N fertilizer according to season quality and more tailored targeting of nutrients are vital for profitable investments in fertilizers in Africa. The Africa RISING project in Eastern and Southern Africa is currently harnessing some of these principles as vehicles for intensification of smallholder farming systems.

A multi­stakeholders meeting, jointly hosted by the Office of the President and Cabinet and the UN System in Zimbabwe, held today called for scaling up of humanitarian assistance to address the immediate needs of 2.8 million (30% of the total population) drought-­affected people.

Addressing over 170 senior representatives from Government; Diplomatic Corps; Development and Humanitarian Partners; Civil Society Organizations; Non­Governmental Organizations; Private Sector; and the Media; the UN Resident and UNDP Resident Representative, Bishow Parajuli emphasized that “the drought conditions in many parts of the country have been unprecedented and have severely increased the vulnerability of the poor depriving them of their livelihoods including livestock and agricultural production as well as access to water, nutrition, health and education services”.

Like many parts of Southern Africa region, Zimbabwe has been hard­hit by the effects of El Nino, with harvests devastated. The current rainfall season has so far been the driest in the last 35 years rendering over 28 million people food­insecure in the region. The late onset of rains in Zimbabwe apparently reported to be below normal, coupled with higher than average temperatures, has severely affected the prospect of 2015/2016 crop production, livestock and rural livelihoods.

Flooding happens annually in Cape Town’s informal settlements. The impact on residents’ lives is enormous, yet people have few resources to cope. They are also society’s most vulnerable: often unemployed, living in shacks, and with nowhere else to settle but where the water gathers each year. These communities will also bear the brunt of the likely increase in flood events as climate change makes the Cape’s heavy rains more severe and frequent.

We cannot avoid the underlying reasons for why these communities find themselves in such vulnerable circumstances, or the fact that flooding-related humanitarian crises will continue to plague these communities and the city charged with assisting them.

It’s critical to find sustainable, workable flooding responses, now. This means involving communities in flood-prone informal settlements in decision-making processes. The City of Cape Town is responsible for coordinating this response, but has difficulty when it comes to involving local communities.

This book explores the challenges and opportunities of collaborative governance as a way to get a broader group of stakeholders involved in flooding responses, as part of our ongoing research through the Flooding in Cape Town under Climate Risk (FliCCR) project.

The Cape coastline faces into a turbulent ocean. Climate change will make this naturally stormy sea all the more formidable. Cape Town has inherited a complex space to manage: land reclaimed from the sea for forts and harbour walls; towering residential flats lined with cemented promenades; economically critical ports and railway lines; ecologically sensitive beaches, dunes and river mouths; and a legacy of dispossession of black South Africans, and privileged access for wealthy whites.

Increasingly stormy seas and higher sea levels are beginning to show up the existing fault lines in the engineered, social and institutional strata of this complex coastline. People working within the City of Cape Town (CoCT) today are making decisions about how to manage these vulnerable spaces – decisions that future generations will have to live and work with.

Short-term, piece-meal, opportunistic responses to the threat of stormier seas will only increase how vulnerable the built city, its inhabitants, economic activities, and the natural environment are. The City, lead by its Environmental Resource Management Department, is developing a rigorous coastal policy and management framework that will enable politicians, managers and residents to respond consistently and appropriately as they are confronted with an uncertain, dynamic, climate-altered future.

This booklet presents research done by the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities, the Stockholm Environment Institute and partner institutions, working closely with the City of Cape Town, to explore ways to manage changing coastal risks

The Green Choice Alliance (GCA) developed a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Framework to measure the conservation and socio-economic gains of projects that are being implemented using sustainable land use best practice methods and located within the biodiversity hotspots of South Africa as shown on the map.

The Climate Information Portal (CIP) is a web interface operated by the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG), at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The portal, which currently provides climate information for Africa and Asia, integrates climate information into a user-friendly map and graph-based interface. The information comes from a climate database that stores a large suite of observed climate data as well as projections of future climate.

The South African Risk and Vulnerability Atlas (SARVA) is a platform for global change information transfer from research to policy and decision makers. The SARVA program provides a centralised repository for global change research (www.rvatlas.org.za) as well as a collection of integration and awareness tools aimed at improving evidence-based decision-making concerning global change. The current focus of the Atlas is on the country, regions and localities of South Africa. However investigations are being carried out to assess expansion opportunities into other parts of the region.

In the light of the seasonal outlook as produced by the South African Weather Service (SAWS), the following advisory guidelines are suggested. It is emphasized that these advisories are broad guidelines and should be interpreted considering the local aspects of the region such as soil types, cultural preferences and farming systems. Depending on the particular region, the prioritization of the guidelines will differ. The basic strategy to follow would be to minimize and diversify risk, optimize soil water availability and to manage the renewable resources (rain water and grazing) to uphold sound farming objectives. Long-term mitigation strategies should be considered by implementing techniques to enhance in-field water harvesting by reducing run-off and improving infiltration. Reduced tillage methods are very important in this regard, as is basin tillage, to capture rainwater in the drier areas. The provinces should further simplify, downscale and package the information according to their language preference and if possible use local media and farmers’ days to disseminate the information. Users are advised to be on the look-out and act on the daily extreme weather warnings as well as the monthly advisory.

The evidence for global climate change, largely as a result of human activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions, is overwhelming. There is rapidly growing consensus among global climate model projections regarding the nature and extent of the change. The main climate change consequences related to water resources are increases in temperature, shifts in precipitation patterns, an increase in the frequency of flooding and droughts and, in the coastal areas, sea-level rise. While the temperature signal produced by climate change is relatively clear, the precipitation signal is mostly still dominated by natural climate variability, as opposed to anthropogenic drivers of change. This could very well remain the case for the next decade or so, especially at the river catchment scale. With hydrological variability further amplified in response to variable rainfall; the small ‘signal’ amid the large level of ‘noise’ will make it difficult to detect hydrological and water resource impacts with any degree of confidence, thus adding to the challenge of planning appropriate watersector responses to climate change.

In this article the term ‘African leafy vegetables’ was adopted to refer to the collective of plant species which are used as leafy vegetables and which are referred to as morogo or imifino by African people in South Africa. Function is central in this indigenous concept, which is subject to spatial and temporal variability in terms of plant species that are included as a result of diversity in ecology, culinary repertoire and change over time. As a result, the concept embraces indigenous, indigenised and recently introduced leafy vegetable species but this article is concerned mainly with the indigenous and indigenised species. In South Africa, the collection of these two types of leafy vegetables from the wild, or from cultivated fields where some of them grow as weeds, has a long history that has been intimately linked to women and their traditional livelihood tasks. Among poor people in remote rural areas the use of these types of leafy vegetables is still common but nationwide there is evidence of decline, particularly in urban areas. Cultivation of indigenous or indigenised leafy vegetables is restricted to a narrow group of primarily indigenised species in South Africa. Seven groups of indigenous or indigenised African leafy vegetables that are important in South Africa were given special attention and their local nomenclature, ecology, use and cultivation are discussed.