Background
Tuwe Pamoja builds on experiences and lessons from other initiatives focused on NbS and climate adaptation. These include initiatives in Accra, Cape Town, Lusaka and Nairobi and across Sub-Saharan Africa which have been led by project team members and involved transdisciplinary teams to explore co-productive knowledge and governance approaches to adaptation and NbS.
Some notable examples of initiatives include:
- Future Resilience for African Cities and Lands (FRACTAL) transdisciplinary project focused on enabling decision-makers to better integrate climate knowledge into resource management decisions and urban development planning. During FRACTAL, transdisciplinary learning processes enabled various academic and non-academic actors to understand complex and contextual climate risks in African cities, to co-design appropriate responses, build relationships across sectors and disciplines, and take agency towards implementing some of these responses. The learnings that will be taken from this for Tuwe Pamoja include the strong relationships that now exist between the UCT team and the Lusaka team (including the University of Lusaka and federation members). In addition, FRACTAL provided a number of lessons on how to undertake collaborative learning around integrating climate information into urban decision-making.
- Towards Equitable and Sustainable Nature-based Solutions (TES NbS) transdisciplinary project focused on creating awareness of opportunities, constraints and limits to NbS in strategic water source areas in southern African.
- Water and Fire collaborative and interdisciplinary project focused on working with local knowledge to better understand community and individual responses to climate-change induced crises in Cape Town; iv) Pathways to water resilient South African Cities (PaWS) project focused on supporting Water Sensitive design options, including NbS, in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Project Aims and Objectives
The Tuwe Pamoja project aims to strengthen critical capacities across key urban actors (city officials, informal residents, non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations and researchers) to co-design and implement nature-based solutions in ways that contribute to urban development that is just, sustainable and climate-resilient, particularly for the most marginalized.
To contribute to these objectives, solutions need to be locally driven and locally appropriate. The starting point is therefore to strengthen local capacity to generate and consolidate both qualitative and quantitative sources of on-the-ground social and ecological data that can inform nature-based solutions. Capacities also need to be strengthened to work with this evidence base to make decisions around planning, implementation and policy.
This project emphasizes the importance of bringing together multiple actor groups (with various values and priorities) and different evidence types (qualitative and quantitative) to frame nature-based climate action and interventions in a more holistic context that considers diverse needs across time. It will share the tools, methods and insights to support the design and implementation of equitable urban nature-based solutions via global networks. The project will be implemented in four African cities: Cape Town (South Africa), Lusaka (Zambia), Accra (Ghana) and Nairobi (Kenya).
Project Team
Project PIs – Dr Petra Holden and Prof Gina Ziervogel
Project Partners/Funders
Key partners include several groups at University of Cape Town including ACDI, CSAG, Future Water Institute, as well as the University of Zambia, the University of Ghana, the University of Nairobi, Slum Dwellers International, and C40 Cities.
The project is supported by the CLARE Programme which is co-funded by UK Foreign, commonwealth and Development Office and IDRC
