The mayor says the City of Cape Town has to learn many lessons regarding adaptation to climate change.
It will take at least three years for the City of Cape Town to deal with the impact of climate change and the current drought in the region, Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille said on Tuesday.
Welcoming delegates to Adaptation Futures 2018, the world’s leading conference on climate change adaptation taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) this week, the mayor said the City had to learn many lessons concerning adaptation to climate change.
“When we talk about climate change, what we have learned in the City of Cape Town is that what really matters and how you respond to climate change is the actions that you taking.
As we speak today, in 2018, we have been able to bring down that water consumption to just over 500 million litres of water a day, so the opportunity out of the drought, I believe that Cape Town will emerge as one of the most water resilient cities in the world because of how we had to adapt and how we also had to mitigate all of the challenges.” She said South Africa, in February, has launched a successful global water fund model, which seeks to introduce a public-private partnership in innovation financing to conserve watersheds and also water resources in Africa.
This fund project based here in Cape Town is on the successful global water fund model which seeks to introduce a public-private partnership in Innovation financing to conserve watersheds and also water resources in Africa,” said De Lille.
The mayor also stressed the importance of conservation programmes in job creation.
“If it was not also, for the past 17 years, we had a water conservation programme, and through the water conversation programme for the past 15 years, we created 1000 jobs, we trained plumbers and let them loose in our communities to fix leaks and repair pipes.
If we had not done that for the past 15 years, we would have actually found the drought far worse than it is now and I must also say that it was in 2015 when we received an international reward for our water conversation from the C40 cities,” said De Lille.
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