Following three consecutive years of poor rainfall, the city of Cape Town was in the midst of a severe water crisis. The city of 4 million people was projected to run out of water on 12 April 2018 – 'Day Zero'. A collective response from the residents of Cape Town helped avert this crisis.

There are many lessons to be learned from Cape Town’s water crisis about city governance, the management of water resilience, the importance of multi-stakeholder response, and the impact of an emergency on consumer behaviour.

The Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative (CTDRLI) has documented analyses and reflections of key individuals involved in the drought response, through in-depth filmed interviews.

The Resilience Shift has partnered with the CTDRLI to distil learnings from these filmed interviews into a modular toolkit of lessons. These lessons can be used by decision-makers to reflect on critical infrastructure resilience in their own cities – to better prepare for a crisis, and to craft a better response when a crisis does hit.

This project aims to promote systems thinking within cities, water companies and other stakeholders through informed reflection on the Cape Town case study. By articulating the interplay of social and environmental factors with critical infrastructure systems in an engaging format, the project aims to deepen an understanding of the multidimensional and complex dynamics – technical, financial, social, political, regulatory, fiscal, environmental – of infrastructure systems, particularly when under stress.