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Item Enhancing climate change adaptation governance through transforming institutions in Kwa-Zulu Natal Province, South Africa(Emerald, 2023-07-17) Adom, Richard Kwame; Simatele, Mulala Danny; Das, Dillip Kumar; Kulumba, Ahmed Mukalazi; Mazinyo, Sonwabo; Mudau, Lindelani; Sithole, Mikateko; Kubanza, Serge; Vogel, Coleen; Zhou, LeocadiaPurpose – Globally, climate change governance continues to be a significant challenge to policymakers, environmentalists and politicians despite international summits, conferences and programmes designed to find sustainable solutions to the climate change crises. Climate change continues to be viewed primarily as a challenge for the future, whereas many leaders and administrators globally regard it as an environmental issue rather than a challenge that encompasses all aspects of life. In South Africa, these misleading perceptions of climate change continue to prevail both at national and local levels. The government and private organisations do not attach the required levels of urgency needed to address the climate change crisis. While numerous policies and institutions have been established to address these challenges, they lack financial backing, coordination and synergy that cut across the broad objectives of environmental, social and economic agendas. Additionally, weak, eroding trust and manipulating of institutions continue to hinder effective policy implementation and focusdriven governance. This paper aims to explore the structural and governance weaknesses of climate change administration in the KwaZulu-Natal province and South Africa in general. Design/methodology/approach – This paper used extensive literature reviews and a triangulated approach to investigate the weaknesses of the current governance structure in the context of institutional and capacity constraints. Findings – The findings uncovered that most institutions and organisations mandated to address climate change challenges operate in silos, lack required investment and capacity and have weak accountability mechanisms with a shallow understanding of climate change governance.Item Groundwater Potential Zones Assessment Using Geospatial Models in Semi-Arid Areas of South Africa(MDPI, 2023-10-06) Adesola, Gbenga Olamide; Thamaga, Kgabo Humphrey; Gwavava, Oswald; Pharoe, Benedict Kinshasa; Frappart, F.Water resources are under tremendous pressure as a result of the growing demand for water to meet human needs. Hence, it is necessary to delineate groundwater potential zones (GWPZs) to sustainably develop and manage groundwater resources. In this study, the geospatial-based analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and frequency ratio (FR) techniques were used to identify the GWPZs. Seven factors (geology, rainfall, slope, lineament density, soil, drainage density, and land use/land cover), which partially or entirely influence the groundwater potentiality of an area, were accessed separately and later combined to create GWPZ maps. Weights and ranks were assigned to the factors to perform the AHP model using existing knowledge. The FR was performed by calculating the percentage ratio between the dependent variable (boreholes) and the independent variable (factors). The preparation of the contributing factors and the creation of the resulting models was done using ArcGIS 10.8. The final GWPZ maps were classified into five zones: very low, low, moderate, high, and very high. About 80 boreholes in the study area were randomly subset into training and testing datasets; 58% were used for model training, and the remaining 42% were used for validation purposes. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for the GWPZs models were generated, and the areas under the curves (AUC) were calculated. Validation of the models shows that the FR model is more efficient (85.3% accuracy) than the AHP model (83.2% accuracy). The findings show that the AHP and FR models are reliable and can be adopted to characterize GWPZs in arid or semi-arid environments.