Reimagining food systems and climate resilience in South Africa
At a glance
South Africa’s food system is already facing climate change impacts like droughts, floods, and rising temperatures, which are disrupting production and increasing food prices. The Seriti Institute and Southern Africa Food Lab - with the support of the Beyond 1.5 Transformation Hub - launched an initiative in eThekwini municipality addressing the inseparable challenges of securing healthy and nutritious food for the city, while adapting to climate change. The initiative contributes to the development of the food strategy co-led by the Municipality and ICLEI , while supporting a shift from siloed interventions to an integrated, adaptive approach focusing on how food governance can remain inclusive and responsive in a world moving beyond 1.5°C of warming.
What’s happening on the ground
The initiative has worked to build shared understanding across a fragmented institutional landscape in eThekwini. Through interviews, surveys, and a multi-stakeholder workshop, it connected municipal officials, researchers, civil society, and academics, strengthening the ongoing eThekwini Food System Strategy. What makes this work distinctive is its emphasis on collective sense-making and problem-solving across mandates and agendas, going beyond the reductionist way of addressing complex problems that is typical of today’s institutions.
Urgent matters identified during the workshop shaped a map of key concerns that city-level strategies should address: officials and practitioners pointed to disrupted production cycles caused by unpredictable rainfall, delayed planting and harvesting windows, and rising input costs—all of which disproportionately affect smallholder farmers with limited buffers. Water scarcity, flood damage to local infrastructure, weak links between producers and markets, and the absence of real-time, usable information were described as immediate pressures requiring coordinated attention.
Participants were open to thinking together—officials acknowledged gaps, and universities engaged as thinking partners to navigate uncertainty. Discussions were grounded in lived experience (floods, market damage, price increases), highlighting how climate impacts cascade through the food system and how people are already adapting informally. The process reinforced that adaptive governance of food systems at the city level requires the ability to convene the right people for specific gaps, not everyone at all times.
What we’re learning
Adaptive governance is a practice, not a structure. Adaptability relies on how institutions learn, sense change, and respond over time. This includes experimenting with new data uses and viewing emerging tools, like AI, as potential supports for responsive governance if introduced carefully.
Relationships are foundational. Trust, openness, and shared curiosity among officials, academics, and practitioners were as important as the formal agenda, creating space for honest conversation about constraints and possibilities.
Capabilities matter as much as plans. Navigating this complex world requires systems thinking, cross-crisis collaboration, and strong “bridging” capabilities (connecting policy, science, and lived experience). Relational capacities, such as facilitation and sustaining hope, are essential in times of repeated shock.
Uncertainty must be navigated, not eliminated. Since complete certainty is unrealistic, the challenge is to build confidence in learning-by-doing—acting, reflecting, and adjusting as conditions evolve.
Context and potential
This work is still in its early stages. The support from the Beyond 1.5 Transformation Hub was catalytic yet time-limited, and while the workshop was successful, some felt more follow-up time was needed. A key tension remains between the urgency dictated by the climate crises and food insecurity, and the time required for meaningful, cross-institutional integration. The team is clear that while workshops alone don’t transform systems, they create the necessary conditions for change: shared language, new and stronger relationships, and confidence to continue the conversation.
What is next
The facilitation team and participants agree
Creating follow-on spaces for reflection and learning, including smaller, more focused workshops.
Deepening collaboration between municipal actors, universities, and practitioners as thinking partners.
Supporting early experimentation with adaptive approaches to food governance, particularly the learning-oriented uses of data.
Connecting the eThekwini experience to wider conversations in South Africa and Southern Africa.
There is a strong sense that this work is part of something larger—a network forming around the concern of how food systems can be governed differently in a climate-changed world. Also, while the work is grounded in eThekwini, it offers insights that could inform a broader South African context, highlighting the potential for place-based learning to shape more integrated and impactful national food and climate policy over time.
The Beyond 1.5° Transformation Hub is about building the collective capacity to stay in the work—learning, adapting in real time, and continuing to ask how food systems might support both survival and dignity in the decades ahead.
