Resilient Water Infrastructure: Assessing Nature-based Solutions and Blue-Green Infrastructure in Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town faces a complex and interlinked set of climate-related challenges, including recurring droughts, flooding, intensifying heat stress and biodiversity loss. These impacts are further amplified by rapid urbanization, pollution (often due to poor infrastructure and service delivery), ageing water infrastructure and persistent socio-economic inequality that limits equitable access to safe and reliable water service (Aiyetan, 2025). Measures such as wetlands, bioswales, permeable paving, detention basins, rain gardens, stormwater retention ponds and green roofs/walls offer various benefits and co-benefits by leveraging natural processes to improve water quality, regulate floods, enhance rainwater infiltration, restore ecological functioning and deliver social benefits. Despite their potential, public awareness remains low, while implementation across Cape Town often remains uneven, fragmented, and highly context dependent. This review aims to examine how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and Blue-Green
Infrastructure (BGI) are leveraged as innovative design-integrated solutions that reinforce more adaptive, resilient and water-secure urban infrastructure, and how their effective design and implementation can contribute to achieving sustainable development goals (Browder et al., 2019).