In May 2024, CASCADE held its first City Learning Lab in Harare, opening a multi-city journey to explore how climate change, urban health, and local responses come together in African cities.

The Cascading Climate and Health Risks in African Cities (CASCADE), works across five cities (Harare, Accra, Kampala, Johannesburg, and Cape Town). Launched in 2023, it brings together researchers, policymakers, and communities to better understand climate-health risks and co-produce locally grounded, practical responses.

For the first CASCADE City learning lab in Harare, around 38 participants gathered at Pamuzinda Safari Lodge, just outside the city. Researchers, city officials, residents’ associations, civil protection staff, and environmental health practitioners joined the wider CASCADE team for a day of conversation and shared reflection.

Naming the Issues

Professor Chipo Mubaya, CASCADE Co-Principal Investigator and lead partner in Harare, opened the Lab with an invitation to name what people were already seeing in the city.

Dr. Chris Jack, CASCADE’s Lead Principal Investigator, then reflected on the developing El Niño that would go on to shape the 2023–2024 season, bringing drought, falling food production, rising prices, and pressure on urban services. He invited participants to consider what an event like this means for cities, where climate stress so often shows up first as a strain on infrastructure, livelihoods, and health.

Working in small groups, participants surfaced the climate-health issues they considered most pressing. Cholera outbreaks, water access and quality, the destruction of wetlands, recurrent flooding, heatwaves, food insecurity, and energy scarcity all came up, alongside a clear sense that none of these challenges sits on its own.

Mapping the Connections

To explore those connections, the group worked through six cross-cutting themes: drought, heat, water, food security, flooding, and epidemics. The maps that emerged made the cascading nature of the issues visible. A flood may lead to a cholera outbreak. A heatwave deepens food insecurity. A wetland lost to construction returns later as polluted water and a higher disease burden.

Past cholera outbreaks recurred, including the 2018 outbreak linked to contaminated borehole water, a reminder of how thin the line between groundwater, sanitation, and disease can be in Harare.

Honest Conversations

Some of the day’s most candid moments came during discussions of governance, particularly around the gap between what local authorities are expected to deliver and what they are actually resourced to do. City actors invited CASCADE Fellows to consider attachments with their departments, recognising that the relationships needed for joint problem-solving are built over time.

By the end of the day, participants had identified priority areas to carry forward over the next year and to deepen conversations and shared responses at the next Learning Lab, including sustainable wetland management, water access and its gendered dimensions, climate-health impact modelling, and disease modelling.

These priorities help guide CASCADE’s research in Harare and shape the focus of future engagements.

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CASCADE is one of 14 consortia under the DELTAS Africa II initiative (2023–2026), implemented by the Science for Africa Foundation with support from Wellcome and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

Author: Alacia Armstrong, Communications Lead, CASCADE.