Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

175 CONCLUSION It is very likely that losses to lives, livelihoods, assets and infrastructure will increase in the future as more people migrate to cities and as the effects of global processes such as climate change increase communities’ vulnerability and disaster risk. Many of the implications will be beyond the capacity and experience of local governments to address, wiping out development gain and diverting scarce funds toward disaster relief and reconstruction. Developing countries will suffer most from these impacts, increasing the risk divide within and between nations. Disaster resilience attempts to reduce these losses by mainstreaming physical, social, economic and environmental measures into planning practices to allow urban systems to accommodate, absorb, adapt to or bounce back from shocks to the urban system. Spatial planning is critical in building this resilience. By managing growth and change in cities, spatial planning can promote liveability, sustainability and inclusion (Todes 2011:128). By mainstreaming disaster resilience (including climate change adaptation) into spatial planning practices, these development endeavours can be protected from future losses. Post-apartheid spatial planning has had ‘far more of a life on paper than in practice’ due to various fears and concerns and inabilities concerning implementation (Oranje 2010:66). Planning in South Africa is burdened with addressing housing and service backlogs; fragmented and sprawled spatial patterns and inefficient transportation systems that result in unequal access to urban functions and the economy; challenges of intergovernmental coordination; and so forth. To add another distinct burden – that of building disaster resilient cities –would bemet with contempt or despair. The Durban experience shows how planners and officials can be entrepreneurial and innovative in seeking to promote an emerging policy domain. What can be learnt from this ongoing initiative that is slowly starting to influence the way Durban is being planned and managed, is that by presenting disaster resilience as a means to realise a city’s immediate development priorities whilst protecting the development gain, it is more likely that resilience would be translated into spatial planning practice in South Africa than if it were presented as a policy paradigm inconsequential from what planners are already doing.