Legislators at all levels of government across the globe should take a “resilience-based approach” to plan for climate change, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) has urged.

The call comes after a paper was published in CIWEM’s Water and Environment Journal last week, which investigated the impact of rainfall variability on municipalities’ water and energy demand in South African local governments.

The research revealed a non-linear relationship between water and energy demand and rainfall variability.

It said: “Influencing the operations and budgets of local governments, climate change is a real threat to local governments. The local governments need to be proactively involved in the efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change. This is particularly important in developing countries where the impact of climate change is more severe than in developed countries, yet adaptation and mitigation capabilities in these countries are weak.”

“The Individual municipalities need to understand and establish their climate change impact assessments that take into account their specific conditions and circumstances. This will give rise to the crafting and implementation of effective, efficient and well-targeted policy measures and programmes.”

CIWEM has urged for the message to be echoed worldwide as governments across the globe will have to deal with climate change.

“They need to ensure that the communities for which they are responsible are as prepared as they possibly can be to manage future shocks,” CIWEM argued. It proposed that all tiers of government need to take a resilience-based approach when planning adaptation and mitigation strategies.

The full paper by M. Ncube et al., ‘The impact of climate variability on water and energy demand: the case of South African local governments’, can be found in the March 2013 issue of Water and Environment Journal.