On May 4, 2026, researchers from the Cascading Health Risks in African Cities (CASCADE) project sat down with City of Cape Town officials. CASCADE Project Lead Chris Jack opened the workshop by framing it as a reflective space to align climate-health research and the City of Cape Town’s immediate operational priorities. The engagement fostered a dynamic dialogue where CASCADE researchers shared their findings and decision-makers asked questions, giving both sides the opportunity to co-reflect on the emerging realities of climate-health issues in the city. Engagements like this are part of a wider relationship-building process between CASCADE and the City, one designed to bridge the gap between research and policy.

CASCADE Academic Coordinator Romyne Karan invited the room, a diverse cohort of senior strategists, research assistants, local postgraduate fellows, and visiting researchers from Kampala and Harare to share their backgrounds. This set the collaborative tone for the day, launching a two-way exchange of presentations, reflections, and practical insights between researchers and city decision-makers.

What the research surfaced

The engagement centred on a series of presentations from CASCADE research fellows working on climate-health risks in Cape Town. Together, the talks covered urban heat island effects, the lived experience of flooding and the governance systems meant to respond to it, longer-arc policy pathways, and the data and mapping work that underpins flood planning. What emerged across the morning was less a set of separate findings than a connected picture of how climate health risks actually affect residents, and often how the tools meant to measure it miss what is needed.

In informal settlements in Cape Town, dense corrugated-iron housing creates severe daytime heat stress that disappears into misleading daily temperature averages. Similarly, flooding can be caused by a single downpour or by consecutive days of rain that saturate low-lying areas. While engineers define floods by structural design thresholds, residents define them by their compounding health impacts, such as waterborne diseases like diarrhoea, and mental health strain.

While the City demonstrates exceptional coordination during active crisis responses, transitioning these highly effective temporary measures into permanent, long-term resilience frameworks represents the next critical step in urban planning. Emergency relief, like generic food packs and unfamiliar building materials, often fails to meet households’ needs during flooding. Reframing climate risk as a governance challenge, rather than just a settlement issue, creates space to embed public health into long-term urban resilience planning.

To bridge these gaps, data must include community priorities and lived experiences. Practical next steps include standardizing location names in municipal reports and transforming city service requests into simple impact tools for first responders. Additionally, early warning frameworks must prioritize equity by shifting away from official websites toward the organic WhatsApp threads and neighborhood networks that vulnerable communities actually use. Ultimately, building resilience across Southern African cities requires moving away from rigid regulatory compliance toward adaptive local leadership and collaborative community partnerships.

Turning insight into a shared agenda

The engagement concluded with an open discussion focused on turning these research insights into collaborative action. The CASCADE team asked City officials to identify the knowledge gaps researchers should pursue, and the conversation broadened to include engagement with higher-level governance structures and broader academic partnerships, including potential collaboration with the University of the Western Cape.

On the practical side, Disaster Risk Management was identified as the City’s primary network during crises, prompting a discussion about modernising emergency communication through the tools communities already use like local WhatsApp groups. Packaging authentic lived experiences dynamically carries far more weight with decision-makers than relying on abstract personas.

By the end of the day, the room had agreed to co-create a shared research agenda focused on three or four of the City’s more “wicked problems,” aiming for policy recommendations. The workshop concluded with a shared recognition that urban challenges and climate-risk pathways are interlinked and complex, and that navigating them calls for transdisciplinary approaches, inclusive co-creation, and continuous shared learning across sectors and communities. 

Author: Hugo De Lemos & Alacia Armstrong, Cascade Comms.
June 2026