The Integration of Climate Change Issues on Local Government Planning Processes of South Africa

The establishment of Local Sphere of Government in South Africa was seen as a paramount step towards ensuring successful service delivery to the poor communities in the rural areas. Planning for service delivery at a local sphere is important to integrate and include the communities through participation. In recent years, climate change emerged as one of the greatest challenge to deal with in the entire universe. Its short and long term impacts are viewed as devastating particularly to the poor communities in developing countries. Issues such as floods, drought and unprecedented weather conditions which are sometimes disastrous and associated with climate change are seen to have a huge impact to the processes of delivering services such as water and electricity. Concurrently, economic activities and livelihoods which forms financial base for local economic development of a specific local areas are also affected. This article argues that, poor communities will continue to be vulnerable victims of climate change if measures to address its effect are not strategically placed in the Integrated Development Planning (IDP) processes of local government. The purpose of this article is to provide a critical discussion on the impact of climate change on service delivery; environmental risks, hazards and service delivery; challenges faced in planning for service delivery in local government and the importance of integrating climate change issues in the IDP processes. The article concludes that in order to strategically deal with the effects of climate change on service delivery, the former should be integrated in all aspects of IDP in order to establish measure to eliminate its devastating impacts