Search Climate Insights Directory

A WWF South Africa fact sheet providing key statistics and geographical context for the Cape Floral Kingdom, highlighting its biodiversity and climate.

This report by WWF South Africa provides a guide and case studies on integrating biodiversity into agricultural landscapes in the Cape Winelands. It advocates for regenerative farming practices, such as reducing tillage and chemical inputs, and offers practical strategies for restoring degraded land through passive and active restoration. The document includes specific plant palettes for riverine areas, intercropping, and habitat hedges to enhance ecosystem resilience and support pollinators.

This report by GreenCape identifies business opportunities for value addition from industrial organic wastewater in the Western Cape, South Africa. It highlights the potential for recovering resources like biogas, starch, and whey from the agro-processing sector, while noting significant barriers related to wastewater volumes and capital requirements.

A collection of five South African case studies detailing value-addition methods for livestock value chain residues, focusing on biogas production, insect protein, and composting.

This 2017 industry brief by GreenCape examines the financial viability, financing options, and regulatory landscape for solar photovoltaic (PV) installations for businesses in the Western Cape, South Africa. It highlights the role of local government policy, decreasing technology costs, and electricity price increases in driving adoption across the retail, commercial, industrial, and agricultural sectors.

This report summarizes an information session held by WWF South Africa on October 18, 2017, focused on water saving and stewardship for agricultural producers in the Western Cape. It addresses the critical water scarcity facing the region, the role of producers as stewards of shared water resources, and practical technological and biological methods to improve water use efficiency and mitigate climate risks.

This technical report evaluates water use efficiency and the application of the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) standard among stone fruit farmers in the Western Cape of South Africa. It combines orchard-scale biophysical measurements of peach and plum trees with farm-scale assessments of water balance and quality across nine volunteer farms in the Breede catchment. The report finds that while Western Cape farmers are significantly more water-efficient than global averages, there are local opportunities to reduce water use by up to 20-30% through improved irrigation scheduling and the use of correct crop factors. It also details the implementation of the AWS standard, identifying drought, social risks (such as infrastructure theft), and regulatory uncertainty as primary concerns for farmers.

This report evaluates the Community Safety Forum (CSF) project in the Western Cape, South Africa, which was launched in October 1998 to facilitate multi-agency crime prevention initiatives. While the project succeeded in establishing networks for information sharing and improving interaction between government departments and civil society, it struggled to translate these forums into concrete crime reduction activities due to a lack of decision-making authority and overly ambitious, non-actionable safety plans.

This guide, published by the Stockholm Environment Institute in June 2013, provides a step-by-step methodology for using the weADAPT platform and the Climate Information Portal (CIP) to access and apply climate data for adaptation planning and policy-making. It emphasizes that adaptation is a socio-institutional learning process rather than a purely technical exercise. The document includes a detailed case study in the Philippi suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, to demonstrate how historical data and future projections (using RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios) can inform land-use decisions, specifically regarding the tension between maintaining vegetable production and developing low-cost housing.