At the Confluence of Two Oceans - Report-back from Adaptation Futures 2018, Cape Town

I started writing this post shortly after I returned to California from this conference in Cape Town, but now (in January 2019) the time is dragging on and I'm not sure I'm going to get back to developing this post more, so I'm going to publish it as a half-finished stub to commemorate the event and move on.
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In June 2018 I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the 5th International Climate Change Adaptation Conference Adaptation Futures. This time Adaptation Futures was held in Cape Town, South Africa.

The conference website has links to videos of the plenary sessions, presentation abstracts, and other content reflecting the activities of the conference.

For followers of this conference, the last one was in Rotterdam in 2016, and the next one is in 2020 at a location yet to be announced. Typically the conference rotates Southern Hemisphere to Northern, so I expect a northern location in 2020.

Stepping up on a soapbox for a second: I regret that I am hoping nobody is considering a site in the U.S. The last time it was held in the U.S. was in 2012 in Tucson (see a Jan. 2013 snapshot of the conference website). Since then, things have changed on the U.S. visa/immigration front. We want our Muslim colleagues to be able to attend. So we should not hold it here.

While I was in Cape Town, the thought kept occurring to me that the U.S. Earth science and political science thought-communities are impoverished by the policy barriers keeping foreign scholars and frontline practitioners from crossing easily and securely into our country. (Just sayin.')

But back to the 2018 International Adaptation Futures conference.

A highlight of the conference was the pre-conference field trip to Franschhoek, Western Cape wine country, to visit  the Water Hub water quality field research site and the adjacent Langrug informal settlement, where they are using biomimicry to try to improve the quality of runoff from the settlement (which was polluting nearby farmers' fields).

The Water Hub - https://www.thewaterhub.org.za/

Langrug informal settlement - https://www.flow.org.za/portfolios/genius-of-space-gos2/

The settlement, first formed in the early 1990's, is home to thousands of people and growing every week, with homes appearing further and further up the side of a mountain ridge. The ridge's streams provide clean water to those who harvest it sufficiently high up the slope. We were there in a steady rain and the roads were mostly holding their own thanks to anti-erosion improvements, but water run-off into the shacks looked like a persistent problem.

On the way back to Cape Town we stopped at the famous Theewaterskloof Dam to take in the low water level, recovering from an historic drought.

See its depletion and partial recovery through satellite imagery (July 2018): https://www.thesouthafrican.com/nasa-timelapse-theewaterskloof-dam-july-2018/

On the causes of the drought:

"Was the water shortage caused by farmers, city dwellers or drought?" Piotr Wolski    (19 July 2018)

TL,DR: "[T]he water shortage in 2015-2017 occurred mainly because rainfall was low."

The conference that followed this day of site visits presented fewer novel ideas or dispatches from the field than previous Adaptation Futures conferences I've attended, but that might speak to my growing experience in the field of adaptation more than anything else. The program was also poorly designed (spread out over two programs that were only accessible in PDF form), so it was hard to figure out what was going on much less be strategic in my choices of sessions. My schedule was dictated somewhat by word of mouth advice from friends I ran into in the hallways. The few sessions I found on scenario planning were worthwhile. I might write more on the projects I learned about in those sessions in a later post.

Weirdly, the 2020 conference hosts were not decided by the end of this conference. As of this post's publication (January 2019), there is still no news on the hosts for 2020.

I expect the news to be announced on the 2018 conference's Twitter feed.