Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town maintains a large and economically successful metropolitan area supported by more than two centuries of hydrologic infrastructure. Yet, the impacts of climate change have already been felt in the disastrous drought of 2018 followed by the record-breaking heat of January 2022. This chapter discusses the climate hazards of floods and droughts experienced by Cape Town as a result of interannual climate teleconnections amid the expansion of the Hadley cell. The development of the state’s water storage is traced, like many rapidly growing cities, to a staggered development precipitated by periods of flooding and drought. The worse the climate hazards become, the more important the storage, yet heat and dryness increasingly threaten the water supply, blunting the effect of increased reservoir capacity. As attention turns to water conservation mechanisms, the problem of scarcity exacerbates long-standing political conflicts while throwing the problem of inequality into stark relief. We conclude that the city can take greater steps to contend with flooding and droughts but must deploy resilient strategies in conditions of water scarcity to avoid disproportionate impacts of water policies on the poor.