The devastating flooding that took place last week in Limpopo and Mpumalanga resulted in tragic loss of life, destroyed homes, damaged critical infrastructure, while severely disrupting fragile ecosystems and disrupting livelihoods. Simultaneously, Knysna faced extreme drought and heatwaves, pushing dam levels dangerously low and prompting a local disaster declaration.
Though floods and droughts differ, both reveal intensifying climate volatility that we are experiencing. Climate risk may be global in origin, but its impacts are local, thus making municipalities essential for building resilience.
A Just Transition Requires Adaptation and Local Capacity
South Africa is already experiencing more frequent floods, prolonged droughts, extreme heat and wildfires. The Presidential Climate Commission’s (PCC) Adaptation Readiness in South Africa Synthesis Report finds that the country’s readiness to respond to climate change remains very low relative to the urgency of the growing climate crisis. Governance fragmentation, siloed planning and weak delivery systems are undermining resilience, particularly for vulnerable communities.
The international climate community recognises this reality. Article 7 of the Paris Agreement establishes a Global Goal on Adaptation and affirms that adaptation is a global challenge with strong local dimensions. COP28’s adoption of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience further emphasises multi-level governance, institutional capacity, and locally led adaptation as essential pillars of success.
In other words, the world now recognises that adaptation cannot succeed without empowered local and provincial governments. Yet financing and institutional systems have not kept pace with this recognition.
Floods, Fires and the Municipal Fault Line
The flooding in Limpopo and Mpumalanga illustrates how extreme rainfall interacts with aging infrastructure, insufficient stormwater systems, and spatial planning failures. Rainfall intensities exceeding historical norms overwhelmed drainage systems that were never designed for such extremes. Communities in flood-prone areas bore the brunt of the damage.
In Knysna, drought and rising temperatures, compounded by invasive species, degraded catchments and mounting water demand, exposed vulnerabilities in water supply systems. Emergency boreholes and water augmentation plans are reactive and costly measures that emphasise the absence of sustained climate-resilient planning. Knysna’s experience is not an outlier. Across South Africa, many municipalities are grappling with similar pressures on water systems as climate variability intensifies, infrastructure ages, and demand outpaces planning and maintenance. What is unfolding in Knysna reflects a wider national challenge in building resilient, forward-looking local water governance.
These are not isolated governance failures; they reflect systemic constraints.
Firstly, apartheid-era spatial patterns continue to shape settlement and infrastructure decisions, placing vulnerable communities in high-risk zones.
Secondly, municipalities face deep institutional capacity challenges, including skills shortages, governance instability, and limited project preparation capacity, which hinder effective adaptation planning and implementation.
Thirdly, access to climate finance remains structurally constrained. International climate funds, including the Green Climate Fund and emerging Loss and Damage mechanisms, are increasingly recognising the importance of locally led adaptation. However, municipalities often lack the institutional mechanisms to directly access these resources.
The result is a dangerous misalignment: global adaptation ambition is rising, but local implementation capacity remains fragile.
Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), National Adaptation Plans are meant to promote “vertical integration”, alignment between national and subnational action. The Global Goal on Adaptation indicators under development include measures of institutional capacity, early warning coverage, and subnational implementation readiness.
For South Africa, this gap is particularly concerning. Municipalities are constitutionally responsible for water services, spatial planning, disaster management and infrastructure maintenance, precisely the sectors most exposed to climate risk.
The PCC has prioritised adaptation readiness as a core pillar of South Africa’s just transition. Based on research, the Commission has identified four enabling conditions for adaptation: cooperative governance, sustainable finance, delivery capacity, and robust monitoring systems.
The Commission is actively pursuing the design of the Just Adaptation and Resilience Investment Platform to close adaptation financing gaps, improve anticipatory capacity, and catalyse blended finance solutions.
South Africa must now align its domestic reforms with growing international ambition on adaptation. Strengthening municipal capacity should become a permanent feature of local governance. This requires dedicated climate technical support for municipalities, properly resourced project preparation facilities to develop bankable adaptation projects, and climate-responsive budgeting systems that integrate climate risk into planning and expenditure decisions.
Reforming spatial planning is essential: climate risk assessments must be integrated into municipal land-use decisions and infrastructure planning. Development partners and multilateral funds should prioritise subnational adaptation actions and simplify access mechanisms for municipalities.
The floods in Limpopo and Mpumalanga and the drought-driven crisis in Knysna are not anomalies, they are signals of a new climate normal. Adaptation must be locally led and institutionally grounded. South Africa’s just transition will succeed only if municipalities are empowered with the tools, finance and authority to act.
Climate disasters expose our governance fault lines. But they also present an opportunity: to rebuild stronger, more resilient local systems that protect communities, safeguard development gains, and align national ambition with global climate commitments.
Phindile Mangwana, Senior Manager: Adaptation at the Presidential Climate Commission
*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or .
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