This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper is drawn directly from Chapter 8 of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report. It includes the complete text of this chapter’s Executive Summary. The paper highlights the limits to what adaptation can do to protect urban areas and their economies and populations without the needed global agreement and action on mitigation; this is the case even for cities with high adaptive capacities. It ends with a discussion of transformative adaptation and where learning on how to achieve this needs to come from.

Traffic congestion is one of the major problems facing Dar es Salaam City and is attributed by a number of factors including rapid population increase, inadequate and poor road infrastructure, city structure, rapid increase in number of cars and lack of physical plan to control city development. The city is already implementing a number of strategies in order to minimize traffic congestion. However, many of the strategies are focusing on improving the capacity of roads in terms of increasing number of lanes, proposing new overpasses and underpasses at the main road intersections and improving public transport. These strategies cannot fully overcome the congestion problems in Dar es Salaam on their own unless efforts are made to redistribute services and community infrastructure. The latter can be achieved through physical planning, which has the potential of influencing trip generation and travel patterns and traffic volume in specific roads. Therefore to minimize traffic congestion in the Dar es Salaam both strategies for improving road capacity, public transport and physical planning solutions ought to be applied together

The city of Dar es Salaam, with a population of more than four million, has no climate change adaptation plan. It also has a very large development deficit and lacks adequate provision for infrastructure and services such as piped water, sewers, drains and solid waste collection. Addressing this deficit (and building the institutional and financial capacity to do so) is also important for building resilience to climate change impacts. Eighty per cent of the city's population lives in informal settlements, but there is little effective land use management and a number of these settlements are on sites that flood regularly. Climate change impacts include sea level rise, rising temperatures and increased occurrence of extreme weather, including rainstorms and droughts, all of which present challenges to city and municipal governments that are struggling to reduce the development deficit. This paper discusses the measures being taken to address this deficit and where and how these measures can be accompanied by improved disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

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One of the many contentious issues facing the appropriate and accurate assessment of land degradation is the varying emphasis placed on vegetation degradation and soil degradation processes. This has led to the compartmentalization of land degradation assessment methods, depending on the particular perspective adopted. The land degradation assessment method presented here attempts to take into account both vegetation and soil degradation. This methodology is applied to the southern part of the Monduli District of northeast Tanzania, an area typifying the so-called 'affected drylands' of Africa. Three sets of land cover maps synchronized against long-term rainfall data (1960s, 1991 and 1999) were used to assess land degradation in the area. Utilizing these three sets of land cover maps as a basis for change detection, it is possible to distinguish areas that experienced changes in vegetation due to rainfall variability from those areas that were subject to changes consequent upon anthropological factors. All areas that displayed overall depletion of natural and semi-natural vegetation due to human factors were deemed to have undergone land degradation, whereas areas that experienced inter-annual land cover changes due to rainfall variability were classified as experiencing cover change due to ecosystem dynamics. This method provides a complete and appropriate assessment of land degradation in the study area and can be used to improve degradation assessment in other semiarid areas.