Browsing by Author "Taylor, Anna"

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    A flood of communications in a drought: a frame analysis of the City of Cape Town's communications during the 2017-2018 water crisis
    (2020) Hill, Erin; Scott, Diane; Taylor, Anna
    Like many other urban areas around the world, Cape Town, South Africa relies on governmental management authorities to ensure water supply. Recently, a three year drought from 2015 to 2018 caused a major water shortage, threatening water supply to the city. In response, the City engaged in multiple mitigation efforts, amongst which was a major communications campaign to inform the public and encourage conservation behaviour. Drawing on literature on water crisis management and framing theory, this thesis analyses how the water crisis was framed in communications made available online by the City of Cape Town (CCT) to the public between March 2017 and March 2018. To answer this question, the project adopted a frames study approach to determine the types and characteristics of communication items released by the City of Cape Town, as the water managing authority, during the recent water crisis. The study established that a range of frames were employed by the CCT in communicating the drought. Through an analysis of the trends in the framing of the water crisis messages the study further identified the shifts in framing and messaging throughout the water crisis response period. Six key frames were identified, namely ‘the City success story'; ‘obscurity and ambiguity'; ‘consumption is key'; ‘the situation is controllable'; ‘together we can beat the drought'; and ‘us versus them'. It was found that while there may have been a lack of strategic planning regarding public communications which resulted in conflated messages, the City's communications campaign was nonetheless effective in that it correlated with a significant drop in private – individual and household – water consumption which delayed Day Zero (when water supply would be cut-off and daily water rations would only be available at collection points for the public). The key implication of this study is that despite contradictions, idiosyncrasies and lack of planning, a heterogenous range of messages in communicating a crisis can reach and evoke appropriate responses from multiple audiences of the public.
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    A systematic review of climate adaptation planning in African cities
    (2023) Madhi, Yasirah; Taylor, Anna
    In recent years the need for climate change adaptation has become increasingly important. Adaptation planning is understood to be the process by which actors identify, develop, test, and prioritise strategies and measures to reduce climate risk. In Africa, climate projections predict higher temperature increases than the rest of the globe. Africa is a rapidly urbanizing continent and its urban population is expected to rise to 59% by 2050. Thus, reducing climate risks and leveraging any emerging climate-related opportunities in cities will be a key component of tackling climate change across the continent. In the last few decades, the number of publications on climate adaptation has been increasing considerably. This growing body of climate adaptation research is in need of consolidation in order to draw meaningful lessons from place-specific and hazard-specific studies. This study aimed to collate and review peer-reviewed literature on climate adaptation planning in African cities in order to consolidate fragmented information and establish what is known about how climate adaptation is occurring at the urban scale. Using the systematic review process, relevant documents on the topic were identified and extracted using specific inclusion and exclusion criteria to delimit and broadly characterize the body of literature focusing on climate adaptation planning in an urban African context. Due to the scope and constraints of a minor dissertation, only a sub-set of documents underwent full-text review using thematic content analysis. The code used for thematic analysis was developed through an abductive process using Hunter et al. (2020) and Ford et al. (2015)'s coding categories as a framework. A total of 84 papers were considered suitable for inclusion. The geographical distribution of urban adaptation planning literature was established with most papers stemming from southern Africa (56), followed by East (19), West (17), and North Africa (5). No publications dealt with urban climate adaptation in Central Africa. The country with an overwhelming number of publications was South Africa (40). The majority of the literature was authored by researchers based in institutions outside of Africa (54%). Papers were broadly categorised into articles that tested, developed, prioritised, or identified strategies to reduce climate risk. The papers testing strategies to reduce climate risk were chosen for full-text analysis. South Africa was excluded from the final sub-set in order to focus on assimilating knowledge from elsewhere across the continent. 11 papers underwent the coding processes. Flooding was identified as the main climatic driver of adaptation and most papers emphasized the need for stakeholder engagement and communication. This study showed the value of applying a systematic review methodology to identify trends and consolidate research on the planning aspects of climate adaptation in African cities. It argues for extending the full-text thematic analysis to the entire set of literature identified to strengthen theory development based on empirical knowledge from urban African contexts.
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    Climate change impacts and adaptation in South Africa
    (2014) Ziervogel, Gina; New, Mark; Archer van Garderen, Emma; Midgley, Guy; Taylor, Anna; Hamann, Ralph; Stuart-Hill, Sabine; Myers, Jonny; Warburton, Michele
    In this paper we review current approaches and recent advances in research on climate impacts and adaptation in South Africa. South Africa has a well-developed earth system science research program that underpins the climate change scenarios developed for the southern African region. Established research on the biophysical impacts of climate change on key sectors (water, agriculture, and biodiversity) integrates the climate change scenarios but further research is needed in a number of areas, such as the climate impacts on cities and the built environment. National government has developed a National Climate Change Response White Paper, but this has yet to translate into policy that mainstreams adaptation in everyday practice and longer-term planning in all spheres and levels of government. A national process to scope long-term adaptation scenarios is underway, focusing on cross-sectoral linkages in adaptation responses at a national level. Adaptation responses are emerging in certain sectors. Some notable city-scale and project-based adaptation responses have been implemented, but institutional challenges persist. In addition, a number of knowledge gaps remain in relation to the biophysical and socio-economic impacts of climate change. A particular need is to develop South Africa's capacity to undertake integrated assessments of climate change that can support climate-resilient development planning.
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    Urban climate adaptation as a process of organisational decision making
    (2017) Taylor, Anna; Parnell, Susan
    In a world that is increasingly urbanised, cities are recognised as critical sites for tackling problems of climate change, both by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the impacts of changing climate conditions. Unlike climate change mitigation, adaptation does not have one clear, commonly agreed collective goal. Governing and making decisions on climate adaptation in cities entails contestation over knowledge, values and preferences. Currently, the two dominant conceptualisations of adaptation are as cycles or pathways. Do these models adequately theorise what can be empirically observed in cities as to how climate adaptation is undertaken? Most research on urban climate adaptation emanates from the Global North, where political, scientific, economic and administrative systems are well established and well resourced. There is a dearth of empirical research from cities of the Global South contributing to the development of urban climate adaptation theory. This thesis contributes to addressing this gap in two ways. Firstly, by drawing on both conceptual and methodological resources from the field of organisational studies, notably the streams and rounds models of decision making, organisational ethnography and processual case research. Secondly, by conducting empirical case study research on three processes of city scale climate adaptation in Cape Town, South Africa, a growing city facing many development challenges where the local government began addressing climate adaptation over ten years ago. The three adaptation processes studied are: the preparation and adoption of city-wide sectoral climate adaptation plans; the creation of a City Development Strategy with climate resilience as a core goal; and the inclusion of climate change projections into stormwater masterplans. Data were gathered through interviews, participant observation, focus groups and document review, through embedded research within a formal knowledge co-production partnership between the University of Cape Town and the City of Cape Town government. Processual analysis and applied thematic analysis were used to test models of adaptation and decision making against data from the three case studies. The findings suggest that both the cycles and pathways models of climate adaptation inadequately represent the contested and contingent nature of decision making that prevail within the governance systems of cities such as Cape Town. Based on ethnographic knowledge of how Cape Town's local government undertakes climate adaptation, it is argued that the rounds model of decision making provides conceptual tools to better understand and represent how the process of climate adaptation in cities is undertaken; tools that can be used to enhance the pathways model. The study concludes that progress in adapting cities to a changing climate is currently constrained by both the problems and potential solutions or interventions being too technical for most politicians to deal with and prioritize and too political for most technical and administrative officials to design and implement. It calls for urban climate adaptation to be understood as distributed across a multitude of actors pursuing concurrent, discontinuous processes, and thereby focus needs to be on fostering collaboration and coordination, rather than fixating on single actors, policies, plans or projects.