Lessons learnt from the City of Cape Town’s Capital Portfolio Resilience Assessment

The document details the process and outcomes of the City of Cape Town's initial attempt to analyze its 10-year capital portfolio for climate resilience. It identifies eight key lessons, emphasizing the need for consolidated databases, a focus on climate-related shocks, and the development of project typologies. The analysis revealed significant under-tagging of resilience projects by project managers, particularly in the Human Settlements directorate, and highlights the importance of secondary resilience benefits from primary mandates. The report concludes with a roadmap to mature the resilience assessment process by 2025.

• The City of Cape Town established a consolidated database of 941 projects in its 10-year portfolio, with a total estimated value of R69.5bn, which serves as the essential foundation for resilience analysis.
• To manage the complexity of a multi-sector portfolio, the initial assessment simplified its scope to focus specifically on climate-related shocks rather than all 10 shocks and 12 stresses identified in the 2019 Resilience Strategy.
• The City identified several primary climate hazards, including decreased annual average rainfall, sea-level rise, increased coastal erosion, and a higher frequency of heatwaves (three or more days of 32+ °C).
• The Water and Sanitation department is the most relevant to building resilience to climate shocks, while Urban Waste Management and Human Settlements are also highly relevant, primarily through secondary benefits of their primary mandates.
• There is a significant gap in project tagging; only approximately one-third of projects that actually contribute to climate resilience were tagged as such in the SAP Project Portfolio Management system.
• The Human Settlements directorate was identified as the most 'under-tagged' department, despite most of its projects providing resilience against shocks like fire and flooding.
• Analysis of sector plans revealed misalignments: the Urban Waste Management Directorate showed little resilience intent in its narrative despite having resilience-relevant projects, while Spatial Planning and Environment had high intent but underdeveloped projects for coastal processes like storm surge and sea-level rise.

APA

GreenCape (n.d.). Lessons learnt from the City of Cape Town’s Capital Portfolio Resilience Assessment. https://greencape.co.za/assets/Resilience-Lessons-Learnt-1.pdf

Chicago

GreenCape. Lessons learnt from the City of Cape Town’s Capital Portfolio Resilience Assessment. n.d. https://greencape.co.za/assets/Resilience-Lessons-Learnt-1.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=GreenCape |title=Lessons learnt from the City of Cape Town’s Capital Portfolio Resilience Assessment |url=https://greencape.co.za/assets/Resilience-Lessons-Learnt-1.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{greencapendlessons, author = {{GreenCape}}, title = {{Lessons learnt from the City of Cape Town’s Capital Portfolio Resilience Assessment}}, institution = {GreenCape}, url = {https://greencape.co.za/assets/Resilience-Lessons-Learnt-1.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }