Preparing for the storm — grassroots action drives Durban’s climate disaster response

Over the last three decades, scientists have warned that if we continue to burn fossil fuels and pollute the planet, we will change the planet's temperature, and through this its weather systems. Governments and the private sector globally have not heeded this call sufficiently. We are now living in an age of climate change where severe weather events are not only more frequent, but more dangerous.  

Three simultaneous processes should be high on any government’s agenda. The first is a rapid transition that moves away from fossil fuel dependency in a way that reduces rather than increases inequality and prevents further heating of the planet. The second is a commitment to resilience planning and implementation in urban and rural settlements to adapt to more unpredictable weather patterns. The third, is to strengthen community resources and capacity to receive early warning messaging, plan for and respond to disasters.  

The call for strengthening local and community-level responses to disasters in Durban comes directly from people's experiences of living through the devastating April 2022 floods. Extreme rainfall over 3 days resulted in 544 people losing their lives, and an estimated R17.2-billion of economic damage. Scientists directly attribute the severity of this rainfall to climate change. What people living in Durban learnt over those fateful days was that your neighbours and community are your first responders in a disaster of this level.  

The Durban Coalition is a non-partisan coalition of civil society organisations taking action towards transforming eThekwini into a more just, inclusive and climate-resilient place to live. Forged in response to the April 2022 floods, the last four years have seen the consolidation of a civil society coalition that is building a far stronger and more coordinated network in their city to respond to inequality and climate change. 

The Durban Coalition has 35 member organisations, which include grassroots social movements, NGOs, community-based organisations, faith-based organisations, academic partners, as well as civic structures such as residents and ratepayers associations. In July 2025 the Durban Coalition’s People’s Plan to the Right to Housing in the Age of Climate Change was included in the eThekwini Integrated Development Plan.  

It is here, in the implementation of one of the 16 projects in the People's Plan – the establishment of a community-level disaster management support system – that Gift of the Givers (GoG) and the Durban Coalition started to work together.

Over the last 12 months, the journey of building trust and mutual cooperation between this humanitarian NGO and the members of the Coalition has unfolded, yielding rich social dividends. 

Given the main focus of GoG, the area of primary collaboration has been to channel immediate responses from GoG to members of the coalition requiring urgent support. The role of the Durban Coalition Secretariat in this coordination role, and the targeted use of GoG’s WhatsApp groups – which now include coalition members – has enabled a faster response to the most marginalised and in need.   

Local disasters

Gift of the Givers provides outstanding global humanitarian relief across 47 countries, and holds three decades of expertise and experience in disaster response and management, both human- and climate-made. 

While the response of Gift of the Givers to large-scale disasters has been well documented in the media, what is not always shown is the day-to-day collaboration they have with grass-roots organisations to address daily crises and small-scale disasters. Small-scale and local disasters are life-threatening and devastating to the people who experience them. 

Disasters in Durban hit impoverished people the hardest. So when a fire broke out in the Ekuphumleni settlement in Shaka’s Head at 3am on a Saturday morning, which took the lives of five children from the same family, one of the first calls made was to GoG. They responded immediately with food support and advice on how to handle trauma directly after a disaster. 

GoG has also supported Durban Coalition members and fellow humanitarians, Abahlali baseMjondolo, through the construction of sanitation services (toilet blocks) and extended mobility support to a young woman in Inanda by supplying a wheelchair.  

The collaboration between several coalition members running community feeding schemes and Early Childhood Development centres has also been supported with basic staples like bread, peanut butter and rice through this partnership. 

In Isipingo, south of Durban, a tree collapsed at the Dakota Beach Informal Settlement due to strong winds exceeding 50 km/h. The collapsed tree resulted in the destruction of two homes and left one of the residents paralysed. GoG immediately responded to a call from a Durban Coalition member, Project Empower. A team was on site to assess damage and provide much needed support to the displaced families.  

Ongoing crises

Some crises are ongoing rather than a single event. For people experiencing homelessness, moving towards stability requires a continuum of care that responds to immediate needs while addressing the longer-term factors that keep people trapped in homelessness. 

Durban Coalition member City People’s programme provides this wraparound support, connecting people to food, shelter, documentation, psychosocial support for mental and emotional wellbeing, skills development and pathways into decent employment. GoG supported this continuum by providing monthly food and personal hygiene hampers for three months to programme participants. 

Through the programme, more than 60 people have since transitioned from living on the streets into full-time employment demonstrating the value of combining immediate humanitarian support with medium and long-term pathways towards stability, dignity and opportunity. 

Perhaps the most recent disaster spotlight in the media has been the xenophobic violence and the resultant displacement of thousands of people. The media has also documented the dedicated and tireless work of GoG in providing support to victims of the xenophobic violence in Durban. The targeted attacks, looting, and intimidation against foreign nationals has caused widespread fear, displacement, and severe hardship for many affected families. 

GoG in partnership with Durban Coalition member Refugee Support Services provided grocery support to vulnerable families and individuals, particularly the elderly, infirm, and single mothers, helping them sustain their households during this difficult time. GoG and the Active Citizens Movement have provided consistent support to the women, children and elderly who have been displaced, with hot meals, blankets and water being distributed. 

This partnership between GoG and the Durban Coalition offers a coordinated response at the grassroots level in the city. It also enables strategic planning for climate related events. 

Over the last 12 months GoG and the Durban Coalition have been planning ways in which communities can be more resilient and sustainable. In preparation for the Super El Nino of 2026/2027, where Durban will see unprecedented and extreme temperatures, the Afrika Tanks Programme was initiated. This saw several communities in both rural and informal settlements receive water tanks for water access and storage. Community members showed commitment and contribution to this work by building the bases for the tanks themselves.  

Beyond this direct relief, this partnership has enabled knowledge-sharing with communities around how to respond after a disaster and how to best support each other during such times of crisis. GoG’s inputs have helped inform an innovative disaster response toolkit that was co-developed harnessing knowledge from GoG, Durban Coalition members and tested by experts from the municipality’s Disaster Management Unit. 

A common purpose

When the coalition was formed over four years ago in response to a climate disaster, there was uncertainty about how seemingly unusual bedfellows would coalesce. 

Over the years, the coalition journey has shown that uniting with a common purpose can effectively mobilise grassroots action, develop community plans that inform City policy and implementation, and importantly catalyse partnerships with effective and credible NGOs like the Gift of the Givers Foundation. This mutually beneficial relationship has not only directly benefited the members through much-needed material support and training, but has allowed GoG’s outreach to be more effective, targeted and coordinated. It is critical that communities are supported to build networks for co-ordinated and effective disaster response and relief.  

The partnership between GoG and the Durban Coalition has highlighted the value of broader social justice networks and humanitarian aid organisations to work together, especially in this time of climate change.  

In a context where weather is no longer predictable, extreme weather events arrive suddenly. GoG has been instrumental in responding to such climate-induced flooding and fires, providing food and other immediate forms of relief from these disasters. 

The Durban Coalition has been instrumental in developing broad-based participation and mobilisation for the right to housing in an age of climate change. Both these civil society formations engage the municipality on how we can plan, prepare, respond and build back better after a disaster. 

We will be collectively facing more frequent severe weather events. Therefore it is as a collective that we should start to take action to make our cities safer and more resilient for people living in them. 

The Durban Coalition and Gift of the Givers partnership shows that building climate adaptation and resilience can be done through acts of solidarity, dignity and care. DM