Cape Town's Climate Change Think Tank convenes local leadership to set a new climate change agenda

On 11 March 2013, the Premier of the Western Cape, together with the City of Cape Town and the University of Cape Town, hosted thirty leaders from government, academia, business, industry and civil society at the launch meeting of the second phase of the Climate Change Think Tank.

Focussing on the role of leadership in addressing climate change in the Western Cape, presentations from local representatives provided examples of how climate change is demanding complex, difficult decisions in the Province and the City. This first Climate Change Think Tank event set the stage for a sequence of meetings in which Cape Town's leadership will be briefed on critical climate change problems and challenged to think about how they, as leaders, can collectively and individually contribute to addressing these problems. The next meeting will likely focus on financing climate change measures and paying for climate impacts.

The Climate Change Think Tank was set up in 2009 as a knowledge co-production partnership between the City of Cape Town, the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Sustainable Energy Africa and a range of public and private research organisations in the greater Cape Town region.  The Climate Change Think Tank has received widespread recognition for the sound research it produced in phase one, much of which was collated in the book Climate Change at the City Scale impacts, mitigation and adaptation (edited by Cape Town Platform members Anton Cartwright, Susan Parnell, Gregg Oelofse and Sarah Ward) and has proved effective in mobilising awareness of climate change and its cross-cutting nature among City officials.