ABSTRACT
Discussions on climate change, such as those held in the City of Cape Town’s Climate Change Think Tank, need to start with contributions from a wide range of disciplines, from the interpretative thinking of the social sciences and humanities to the critical production and reading of the natural sciences (Hulme 2008). This chapter takes up part of this challenge by presenting the scientific knowledge produced for the Think Tank on the interaction of the freshwater and marine systems in a local space, the Salt River catchment area in Cape Town. It presents a detailed case study of various scenarios (storm surge, mean sea-level rise, increased rainfall, increased freshwater run-off) for the Salt River catchment as a starting point for increasing institutional knowledge of the flood risks as a result of the influence of climate change on the marine and freshwater system interaction. This study follows on from completed sea-level rise modelling as well as the ongoing storm-water and catchment management assessments undertaken to understand flooding in the catchment.
