ACDI’s new urban climate adaptation project, TrackADAPT launches in Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay

TrackAdapt (Tracking Urban Adaptation to Close the Gap) is a three-year research project (2025-2028) hosted at the ACDI and led by researchers Dr Anna Taylor, Songo Benya and ACDI director Prof Gina Ziervogel. The project explores how a structured expert judgement tool called ‘GAP-Track’ can be adapted to assess urban climate adaptation progress and gaps in two South African metropolitan municipalities, namely Nelson Mandela Bay and the City of Cape Town. 

In July 2026, the TrackAdapt team launched the project in Cape Town at the UCT Design School and in Gqeberha at the Nelson Mandela Art Museum.  Following each launch, a dedicated workshop was convened with experts to identify how the modified tool could be applied and tested in each municipal context. The Cape Town launch was led by project PI Anna Taylor, Prof Gina Ziervogel and ACDI researcher Songo Benya, while the Gqeberha Launch was led by Belinda Clark, Abigail Kamineth and Therese Boulle. Both launches were attended by a range of stakeholders including municipal officials, academics, civil society and community-based organisations, environmental practitioners and local knowledge holders. These events offered an early sense of how the project and the modified tool might land in each municipal context and what would be needed to make the process work in practice at the urban scale. 

The GAP-Track tool (the Global Adaptation Progress Tracker) was developed by the IDDRI (Sustainable Development and International Relations) with AFD (the Agence Française de Développement) funding to assess climate adaptation progress at global, national and regional scales, informing the 2023 UNFCCC Global Stocktake and strengthening international cooperation on adaptation. The tool draws on expert judgement, using a scoring system from 0 to 4 across six overarching questions and 19 sub-questions. In the context and scope of a single project, TrackAdapt focuses on two of the many Representative Adaptation Challenges (RACs), namely adaptation to drought and rising temperatures (RAC 1- water) and adaptation to coastal erosion and marine flooding (RAC2-coastal). 

Cape Town launch and workshop – translating plans into measurable outcomes

The Cape Town launch, held on the 28^th of July 2026, drew 22 stakeholders and was followed by a workshop with 12 experts initially identified to take part in the TrackAdapt assessment process. Following the workshop, a further eight experts were identified and invited to contribute to the assessment, expanding the pool of expertise informing the Cape Town process. Deputy Mayor of Cape Town and Mayoral Committee Member for Spatial Planning and Environmental, Alderman Eddie Andrews delivered the opening remarks, where he emphasised moving beyond climate plans to assessing whether current interventions are producing meaningful adaptation outcomes. This was a central message echoed throughout the workshop and ultimately positioned TrackAdapt as a project not only concerned with whether plans, policies and interventions exist but whether these documents translate into equitable action that reduces vulnerability for at-risk communities.

The discussions highlighted that completed projects and interventions should not directly read as an outcome, instead, the knowledge and evidence gained through those processes should be integrated and connected directly to budgets, decisions, and actions, with attention paid to impact. Alongside these discussions, important questions were raised about who benefits from adaptation and whether these benefits are equally and equitably distributed amongst different stakeholders. 

The TrackAdapt team reflected on the value of the workshop and why discussions with experts were particularly useful in highlighting gaps in current adaptation research, policy and interventions: 

“The Cape Town workshop moved the conversation from the broader questions raised at the launch into the assessment itself. Experts worked through the scoring, discussing the questions, supporting evidence, the basis for their scores, and justification for their responses. These discussions were particularly useful in surfacing different interpretations, identifying where evidence was available, and highlighting gaps. Importantly, these were not only gaps in evidence but also reflected the different disciplinary framings through which experts understand of RACs”

Some of the key challenges flagged at the workshop included (1) dealing with different scales, (2) tool and data collection fatigue, (3) comparability of results between cities and over time, (4) financial blind spots, (5) public buy-in, (6) lengthy timelines for adaptation and (7) responsibility and equity challenges that come with land ownership along the coast. 

The workshop also highlighted several synergies between the project and other work that is being done by the City of Cape Town, which deals with climate, coastal hazard assessments, CCT water resilience strategies, water sensitive indexes, flood management, drought management and remote sensing tools.

Some of the key themes that emerged from the Cape Town workshop included: (1) what counts as adequate supporting evidence for the scores given by experts; (2) how to account for ongoing projects within the assessment, when outputs and outcomes have not yet reached fruition; (3) mandates and system boundaries create fragmentation across adaptation actors; and (4) the question of differing confidence levels that experts attach to their responses depending on their function and area of expertise. 

Nelson Mandela Bay launch and workshop – connecting strategy to lived experience 

The Nelson Mandela Bay launch followed the municipality’s recent completion of the Climate Resilient Development Strategy and Action Plan, positioning TrackADAPT as a project to build on this existing work. This launch was attended by 38 stakeholders, with a follow-up workshop where 19 experts took part who were identified for the tool assessment process. The event opened with young people using art and poetry to speak about climate resilience and water scarcity, which offered vivid and practical illustration of the issues driving climate risk in the city. One of the key takeaway messages from both the launch and follow-up workshop was the value of different knowledge forms when trying to implement the assessment and the fact that adaptation has already taken different forms that are often not formally recognised within the current city-wide metrics for climate adaptation. 

Councillor Thsonono Buyeye, a member of the mayoral committee for Public Health, delivered some opening remarks highlighting the importance of the project in strengthening climate resilience and supporting sustainable development for the metro. He also spoke to the importance of collective action, from government, academia, business, civil society and communities and how municipal partners need to better understand how climate interventions can effectively respond to local risks and community needs.  

Workshop discussions identified several challenges, including a lack of locally available evidence, the difficulty of capturing embodied and locally held expertise within the tool’s existing indicators and questions of scale and institutional interdependence. As quoted from the workshop report, the researchers found that adaptation cannot be contained within administrative boundaries: 

“Evidence, water systems, institutional boundaries, community action and the Port Authority all pointed to the same broader issue: adaptation does not happen within neat administrative or disciplinary boundaries” 

The workshop also emphasised that climate change is not only the responsibility of environmental management departments, but it also needs to be understood as “everybody’s business” where different sectors, parts of the municipality, and communities all recognise that they have a part to play in the process. 

Lessons learnt and what is next

Across both engagements, many lessons emerged that will shape the team’s implementation of the TrackAdapt project and tool. These lessons include firstly that recruiting the right experts takes time and relationship building, secondly implementation alone does not demonstrate adaptation outcomes, thirdly evidence remains fragmented across sectors and institutions, and lastly scale and local context fundamentally shape how the assessment plays out, and the tool itself will need to keep evolving based on this context. 

Each workshop and location offered something unique for knowledge exchange. In Cape Town, the engagements foregrounded the challenge of translating investment and planning into real reductions in vulnerability. In Nelson Mandela Bay, the process offered an opportunity to connect a complete formal strategy with community knowledge, creative practice, and the lived experiences of climate risk. 

These two events are the start of an exciting multi-year project and the process of testing and refining the GAP-Track tool for use at the urban scale. This work speaks directly to ACDI’s broader mandate and objectives on urban climate adaptation and closing adaptation gaps in South Africa’s metros. The launch and workshops offered valuable lessons for researchers, municipal practitioners and communities grappling with similar climate-related risks in urban areas around South Africa. 

This builds on the work done in partnership with DFFE last year to prepare the adaptation component of South Africa's second Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement.