Technical Analysis for the Adaptation Component of South Africa’s Second NDC

Context and Purpose of the NDC2 Technical Support

Research teams in the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) and the Energy Systems Research Group (ESRG) at the University of Cape Town carried out analyses pertaining to climate change adaptation and mitigation as technical support to government in developing South Africa’s second Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC2) under the Paris Agreement.

The technical report presents the evidence informing South Africa’s climate change adaptation targets and priorities to 2035 articulated in the country’s second Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC2) submitted to the UNFCCC in October 2025, ahead of COP30. NDC2 extends and increases ambitions set in the 2021 update to SA’s first NDC. The submission of NDCs every 5 years is a requirement of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement.

South Africa’s policy ambition for the coming NDC2 period is to advance adaptation implementation, building on and extending the legislative developments that have been the primary focus over the past five-years, culminating in the promulgation in 2024 of SA’s Climate Change Act. To support the ambition of advancing adaptation implementation where it is needed most, the technical report sets out to review key climate change risks and identify priority adaptation measures for resourcing between now and 2035.

The study set out to do six things:

1. Identify key climate risks that need to be adapted to currently, through the 2030s and towards the 2050s, based on the latest climate science.
2. Take stock of SA’s current adaptation strategies, action plans and implemented actions to review progress and the trajectory of existing adaptation efforts and intentions.
3. Identify gaps and opportunities for additional adaptation actions, articulated as a proposed set of adaptation goals and interventions, aligned with NCCAS and raising ambition from the updated NDC1.
4. Estimate the investment required to implement the 36 climate change adaptation options identified from the period 2026 to 2035.
5. Provide means to rank the options in terms of merit as a means of understanding the options better, and in case investment constraints require difficult trade-offs regarding which options top implement.
6. Indicate to those responsible for raising climate change adaptation investment, where the funding for respective options might be found based on the public/ private good nature.

Key Findings: Climate Risks, Adaptation Progress, and Priority Actions

The climate change risk review highlighted the cascading and escalating nature of risks under increasing warming, as well as the differential impacts distributed both spatially and socially. The availability and provision of adequate water and sanitation services have already been heavily impacts across many parts of South Africa, where climate hazards – notably droughts and floods – compound technical and management problems, with the impacts cascading to health, tourism, sanitation, economic output and levels of employment. South Africa’s food systems and communities reliant on agricultural and fisheries livelihoods are highly vulnerable to changing patterns of heat, wind and rainfall. Both human and animal health are already being compromised through exposure to hotter temperatures and extreme weather, leading to increased range and transmission of infectious diseases, increased heat-related mortality, increased mental health conditions, homicide, and drought-associated malnutrition, placing additional strain on South Africa’s already struggling health and economic systems. Built environments or human settlements, infrastructure networks (including transport and energy) and biodiverse ecosystems on land and in water are under severe strain, with emerging climate conditions comprising and degrading their functioning, with some close to critical thresholds. Many of these technical and ecological systems cross municipal, provincial and national boundaries. The evidence is clear that coordinated adaptation actions are urgently needed, from the local to the regional scale, to curb the uptick in severe losses and costly damages that South Africans are experiencing in their personal and working lives.

The stocktake of existing adaptation efforts shows considerable progress has been made on assessing, planning and resourcing adaptation efforts, but this is not nearly enough. A total of 19 sub-national adaptation strategies or plans and 129 implementation-oriented adaptation projects were identified that can be learnt from and built off, by scaling up, out or deeper to amplify the impacts, especially for those most socially and economically marginalised, notably those living with disabilities and severe physical and psychological trauma. Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal emerge as major hotspots for adaptation action, alongside the Western and Northern Cape. There is a risk of regional concentration of adaptation capacity and efforts, with less attention being given to more peripheral or underserved areas, especially peri-urban areas. Adaptation efforts remain largely disjointed and insufficiently sustained, highlighting the need for coordinated action, resourcing and monitoring. Opportunities exist to build on existing adaptation efforts that increasingly recognize and respond to multiple, intersecting hazards, especially drought, flooding, wildfires, and invasive species threats. Emerging, complex risks such as sea-level rise, extreme heat, and biodiversity loss are beginning to receive focused attention, although issues like food system shocks and climate-induced migration remain under addressed.

The study identifies and articulates 7 adaptation goals and 36 adaptation options to address key gaps and leverage opportunities for South Africa’s adaptation agenda and notes an eight goal that was added during the political NDC process. The 36 adaptation options do not cover the full extent of climate change risks facing South Africa. Instead, they suggest a set of priorities to focus on in the coming 10 years. Implementing the prioritised actions in a coordinated fashion based on action-learning can strengthen South Africa’s systemic capacities to detect and act strategically on emerging climate change risks that are contingent on a complex set of domestic and international factors. Many of the adaptation interventions likely to be prioritised and mobilized to achieve the additional goal 8 are covered under adaptation goals 2, 3 and 7. However, a next iteration of NDC technical work needs to unpack further what needs to be done to achieve goal 8 and include any relevant additional actions in the multi-criteria and cost benefit assessments.

The study estimated an investment need for all 36 options to be R25 billion per year for ten years. Three quarters of this investment was required for the 9 options in Adaptation Goal 1: Adapt South Africa’s water and sanitation systems to drying conditions and drought and flood intensification, as water underpins human, plant and animal health and all economic and livelihood activities.

A multi-criteria assessment, a cost-benefit analysis (in which benefit was defined by human impact) and an estimate of lives saved was used to rank the options. Given that all 36 options were selected for their merit, the differences between the options when ranked by the respective tools was marginal. In terms of cost-benefit (economic efficiency), the following options emerged as the most cost-effective:

• 2.4 Extend and upgrade sanitation services in high-risk informal settlements, especially near food vendors, which saved money by displacing expenditure on contracted portaloos;
• 5.4 SADC integrated regional drought monitoring system;
• 5.1 Enhance early warning systems (monitoring, warning dissemination and response triggers), building on SAWS multi-hazard EWS.

The ranking exercise involved decision makers sharing perspectives and opinions on the respective adaptation options, all of which helped to build understanding of the options and what would be required to implement them. The model developed can be used repeatedly and in a variety of ways for this purpose. It is recommended that this exercise is repeated with more decision makers across the technical and political domains, as the process of detailing the practicalities of each option, going through the scoring, deliberating differences and arriving at an agreed set of results is crucial to building buy-in to the implementation of South Africa’s adaptation agenda across multiple sectors.

The final task found the respective options differed greatly in terms of their public/ private good attributes. This is important in terms of who might be expected to invest in them and blending the investment required for South Africa’s climate change adaptation over the next 10 years. While climate change adaptation has historically been cast as a ‘public good’, the analysis points to some adaptation options that could attract private sector investment. The incentives for private sector investment are expected to increase as climate change impacts get worse and these investments should be marshalled by public budget allocations. Given that South Africa budgeted over R400 billion for related activities in 2025/26, i.e. R210 billion for local government’s equitable share, human settlements and water and electricity infrastructure, an additional R175.7 billion for economic regulation and national infrastructure, and R23.7 billion for agriculture and rural development, there is a clear case for spending existing budget allocations in ways that are more aligned with climate resilient development.

The technical brief summarises the adaptation component of the work, reviewing key climate change risks and adaptation efforts to date, proposing seven priority adaptation goals, and estimating the costs and benefits of identified adaptation options.