The recent Cape Town drought and fear of a severe water crisis between 2015- 2018 was followed by a fast-tracked crisis management response. In line with a wider global trend, the City of Cape Town adopted a technology called ‘reverse osmosis desalination' into the water supply mix. This ‘water production' technology is alluring as it promises to be ‘drought- proof', preserving a constant flow of water in times of increased climatic uncertainty. Yet, the implementation of water technologies in Cape Town continues to be a highly debated topic. Cape Town suffers from a longstanding legacy of uneven racialized infrastructure development practices, resulting in unequal water access and consumption. In this context of unequal water security across social groups and increased climatic vulnerability, it is important to carefully consider the implications of new water technologies if the desired outcome is a more sustainable and equitable water future. Drawing on urban political ecology, this dissertation explores the process in which the instalment of three temporary desalination plants and planning for permanent desalination in Cape Town emerged. This, in order to carefully consider its consequences for equitable water security. By utilizing secondary official city documents, reports and news articles from several credible news platforms, supported by a number of personally conducted semistructured interviews and secondary sourced interviews with City employees, this thesis aims to understand how desalination is constituted as a crisis response. This exploration is organized around analyzing the relationships and dynamics between various actors, the events that signified the processual nature of the adoption and the emergent effects for water access across the City. The findings reveal that the promise that desalination holds as a technical solution to climatic uncertainty undermines the / contradictions that evolve alongside the instalments. While desalination was pushed by the municipality as a drought relief technology for all citizens, the results show that the emergence of this technology came with frictions, as it was contested, ecologically disturbed and critically questioned by multiple actors. As my findings demonstrate, desalination triggers the emergence of exclusive decision-making processes and financial constraints, especially for vulnerable citizens. This thesis thus argues that desalination implies to only secure water for some, while intensifying water insecurity for the already vulnerable. While the City strives towards a “shared water future”, the high focus on extending its water supply to meet growing demands lacks consideration of meeting existing demands, excluding the socio- political processes within current water decision making. This rather reinforces racialized- spatial and distributional inequities across a diverse range of social groups within the City.

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In 2010, the Office of National Coordinator (ONC), a branch of the federal government, launched a program called the IT Professionals in Health Care Program. The Program was intended to address the anticipated shortage of skilled workers in health information technology (HIT) and electronic health records (EHRs). According to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC, 2014), the ONC estimated a shortfall of 51,000 HIT workers over 5 years in terms of the number that would be needed to fully support health care providers and facilities in the adoption of EHRs. The growing demand for HIT professionals did not match the number of graduates that the health institutions were releasing into the job market. This pattern necessitated the training of more HIT professionals to reduce the predicted market deficit. The need for persons with specialized skill in HIT once again placed the community colleges in a central role in providing training of a workforce that can meet the market demand for employees with knowledge, skills and competencies in HIT. The current study is intended as a follow-up to that evaluation and seeks to identify the sustainability of the preparation programs initiated through the IT Professionals in Health Care Program in Region D colleges, which are those colleges in a consortium of 11 southern states. The study was conducted as a qualitative study in which 6 program directors at 6 of the 20 participating community colleges in region D were interviewed regarding their perceptions of the sustainability of the Health IT Workforce Development Program. In addition, websites and curriculum guides were analyzed so that the data could be triangulated with the interview responses. Interviews of the 6 program directors revealed that difficulties arose when employers questioned if students completing the program would be ready to take on the responsibilities necessary for the demanding positions that were available in the healthcare IT workforce. The 6 program directors interviewed stated a key area of improvement would have been to add a practicum that allowed for hands on experience as well as ensuring a suitable workload to for the program.

The purpose of this study was to review the established sustainability guidelines in place at each of the 15 public community and junior colleges in Mississippi and to illuminate the ways in which these community colleges interacted with environmental sustainability during the 2013-2014 academic year. Dimensions studied within the established guidelines included curriculum, research and scholarship, operations, faculty and staff development, outreach and service, student opportunities, and administration, mission, and planning. This research study was qualitative in nature and utilized a multiple case holistic design. Sustainability guideline documents, informant commentary, college policy documents, and college course catalogs were gathered from 6 of the 15 community colleges in Mississippi and used to prepare a descriptive analysis of the results. The results of this studied showed the following: a) only a portion of the reporting community colleges discuss sustainability topics in courses on campus, b) none of the colleges reported having sustainability guidelines related to research and scholarship, c) all colleges reported having sustainability guidelines and efforts in the area of operations, d) a small number of the reporting colleges noted having faculty and staff development concerning sustainability guidelines on campus, e) half of the reporting colleges noted that sustainability guidelines are incorporated into outreach and service, f) a small number of reporting colleges stated that sustainability guidelines and efforts are incorporated into student opportunities, g) half of all reporting colleges noted that sustainability guidelines are utilized in the area of administration, mission, and planning. Recommendations for further research are discussed.

Climatic hazards, such as flooding and drought, are expected to increase in frequency as a result of climate change. Growing evidence suggests that climate-induced water challenges will interact with health concerns, compounding pre-existing challenges for vulnerable populations in low-and middle-income contexts. Due to the novel nature of COVID-19, limited research has focused on the combined impact of the climate crisis and COVID-19 on human health, particularly in South Africa. Thus, there is an urgent need to enhance understanding of the adverse health impacts linked to climate-related water stressors. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study drew upon multiple datasets to explore water-related health risks prevalent during the Cape Town drought, and in the subsequent period up to and including the current COVID-19 pandemic. Data sources include qualitative stories from a community resilience project, video interviews from the drought response in Cape Town, quantitative COVID-19 water service delivery data from informal settlements, and a document analysis of the Cape Town Water Strategy. Data was analysed using inductive and deductive research approaches to piece together different perspectives on how the pandemic interacts with pre-existing hazards. The study uses the climate-water-health nexus framing to investigate some of the critical health risks present during and after the drought. The study also explores how the COVID-19 pandemic interacted with health and water issues, providing a snapshot of the lived experience of the urban poor during an emerging public health crisis. The study subsequently considers the implications for the Cape Town water sector in view of the drought and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Results from this study show that inadequate sanitation and exposure to wastewater are the most commonly cited health risks for low-income households in the study sites. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing water-associated health risks by indirectly widening health inequalities and increasing poverty levels. Moreover, compound risks have limited the ability of low-income households to cope with additional shocks and stressors. The findings of this study contribute to a critical research gap and expand the evidence base on the relationship between climate change, water, health, and compound risks in the South African context. The study calls for the adoption of a cross-sectoral, integrated approach to address health threats at the climate-water-health nexus.

Cape Town has recently undergone major policy and regulatory changes within its water management strategy in response to a three-year drought (2015-2018). Due to the vulnerability of humanity to climate change, its uncertainty, and the risks that it poses for securing a reliable source of water, it is important to fully understand the implications of Cape Town's responding water management changes, in understanding that similar events could occur again in the future. Situated within the field of political ecology, this research aims to determine how the evolution of water management in Cape Town in response to the drought will most likely impact the ideal of equitable water service provision throughout the city's post-crisis context. By utilizing a series of personally conducted semi-structured interviews and secondary official city documents, this research focuses on the tourism industry and the African Water Commons Collective (AWCC) as a lens to understand what motivated the CoCT's water-policy decision-making processes, how the economy and low-income communities were considered and treated in response to these decisions, how these have gone on to impact their respective experiences with water accessibility, and what this implies regarding their accessibility for the near future. The results reveal that a significant number of policy decisions were based on the emergence of a duality of crisis: (1) a drought that mandated reducing demand and augmenting supply and (2) a financial model in need of stabilizing in order for the department to be able to do so. The tourism industry and low-income communities indeed experienced the City's governance responses differently; their experiences each implying very different outlooks for their accessibility in the future. The tourism industry's position within the economy and local government has proven to make it better able to adapt and be resilient in the face of water shortages, painting a pretty picture for its future survival in the face of climate change. The strained relationship between low-income communities and local government, on the other hand, has proven to complicate the City's attempts to improve water and sanitation services in those areas. Without this communication, the City cannot expect to fully understand how the impacts of their decisions are influenced by the spatial and infrastructural contexts of low-income communities. For this reason, improvements in living conditions for those areas cannot be expected. Rather, it is important that the City recognizes the impacts its decisions have on accessibility for the poor, and why. Recognizing that similar events are increasingly likely in the future, at a global scale and with greater frequency, the ability of the Water and Sanitation Department (W&SD) to recognize, reflect and react to these conflicting objectives is crucial if equal water accessibility between citizen groupings is ever going to be met.

Climate is changing, and this change poses threats to the agricultural sector. The impacts of climate are expected to become more extreme as the earth warms, and this change will affect climate suitability for different types of crops. The degree to which an increase in temperature patterns and rainfall variations will affect climate suitability for agricultural practices needs to be further understood. This can be achieved by performing a climate sensitivity analysis and contribute to informing adaptation policies and mitigation measures. This study aims to analyze the sensitivity of important crops in Zimbabwe, maize, and tobacco, in response to changes in temperature and rainfall patterns. This research paper used a sensitivity analysis of climate variables; rainfall, and temperature, using historical climate data derived from WorldClim for the period 1990-2018 to assess climate suitability. The historical climate data was used as the baseline to assess the sensitivity of maize and tobacco under a 2°C, 3°C, and 4°C temperature increase as well as a 5%, 15%, and 30% increase and decrease in annual average rainfall amount. The modified spatial climate data was computed in QGIS, and suitability was simulated using the Ecocrop model embedded in the DIVAGIS user platform. The results from this study indicated that in Zimbabwe, both crops are more sensitive to rainfall changes than to temperature changes (independently). A 5%, 15%, and 30% decline in the average rainfall will result in previously suitable areas becoming marginal, very marginal, and others unsuitable for both crops that are in agro-ecological regions I to III; i.e., provinces that include Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland West, Mashonaland East, Harare, and Manicaland. When crops are subjected to combined changes (temperature and rainfall), both crops become more sensitive. When exposed to high temperatures and low rainfall together, for instance, provinces such as Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland West, Mashonaland East, and Harare which are known as historically suitable areas for maize cultivation, will become marginal or very marginal. This change in suitability could have consequences not only on food security but also on people's livelihood and understanding the crops' sensitivity to climate changes helps support the well-being progress of the country.

Human-Elephant Conflict is a topic of conservation and socio-economic concern in light of its impacts on elephants and humans alike. The phenomenon has been occurring since the 19th century in Asia and Africa. Land use changes and human expansion into previous wildlife strongholds has exacerbated and increased Human-Elephant Conflict notwithstanding the impacts of an increase in the human population worldwide. Human-Elephant Conflict usually occurs in areas adjacent to protected areas with little know of the nature of Human-Elephant Conflict in areas which are not located near protected areas. Mmashoro Village and surrounding farms are an example of an area that is not located adjacent to a protected area but that is still exposed to Human-Elephant Conflict. The nature of Human-Elephant Conflict in Mmashoro village and surrounding farms consists of damage to fences, JoJo tanks and private gardens. Human-Elephant Conflict in Mmashoro village and surrounding areas has also been increasing over time. Human-Elephant Conflict in Mmashoro village and surrounding farms has varying (in degree and extent) impacts on the financial and emotional livelihoods of farm owners, farm workers, and local residents. This study found that the management strategies employed by the Government of Botswana to mitigate impacts of Human-Elephant Conflict were found to be inhibiting and restricting the livelihoods of all stakeholders. The interventions pursued by the government were, therefore, not enabling the present and future potential livelihoods of all stakeholders while also disadvantaging and prejudicing other stakeholders such as Local Residents and Farm Workers. The results of this study therefore indicate that Mmashoro village and surrounding farms present as an interesting case study as the site is not located next to protected areas as is the case with various conflict regions. As such, this study found that more nuanced and adapted management strategies were needed to ensure that government interventions were effective in areas such as Mmashoro Village and surrounding farms. Further studies are needed in sites which are not located next to protected areas but where Human-Elephant Conflict still occurs albeit haphazardly. Such studies will help to highlight the varied approaches often needed in the different geographical and social regions even though such approaches are often disregarded.

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