National climate change adaptation plans must empower local communities

Take, for example, Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa. As Cape Town residents recently rallied to stave off so-called ‘Day Zero’ – when city officials would have turned off all the taps as a result of a multi-year drought - Johannesburg had the opposite problem: coping with flooding caused by heavy rains.

Environmental scientists have been telling us for decades that climate change will make weather patterns more variable and less predictable, and that it will make extreme weather, like floods and droughts, more frequent and more intense.