Anna Taylor

Expertise: Climate adaptation in cities

Anna’s research addresses questions of climate adaptation in cities, particularly developing a process-based understanding of how urban climate adaptation happens and is organized or governed. Anna is currently involved in the Future Resilience of African Cities and Lands (FRACTAL) project, within the UK-funded Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) programme. FRACTAL is a 4 year project coordinated by UCT’s Climate Systems Analysis Group (CSAG). The project aims to advance scientific knowledge about regional climate variability and change in southern Africa and work with decision makers to integrate this scientific knowledge into climate-sensitive decisions at the city-regional scale (particularly decisions with a lifespan of 5 to 40 years relating to water and energy systems and services). Anna is also collaborating with colleagues at UCT, the University of KwaZulu Natal and the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research on a multi-disciplinary research project (called CLIMWAYS) that analyses the governance dimensions of water resource management and urban climate change adaptation in the cities of Durban and Cape Town. She is completing her PhD research focusing on the City of Cape Town, investigating three cases of urban climate adaptation as a process of decision-making, namely creating a city development strategy, preparing sectoral climate adaptation plans of action, and the revision of stormwater design parameters to account for changing rainfall patterns. This entailed working as an embedded researcher in the City of Cape Town municipal government between 2012 and 2015 and formed part of the Swedish-funded Mistra Urban Futures (M-UF) programme.