On 3-4 February 2010, the ACC, the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) and the University of Manchester's Global Urban Research Centre (GURC), hosted a 2-day workshop on 'Climate Change, Asset Adaptation and Food Security in Southern African Cities'. The workshop was funded by the Ford Foundation, New York. The workshop examined the feasibility and modality of focusing on an urban climate change nexus that links climate change science, asset adaptation, and food security. In bringing together researchers, planners and policy makers with different expertise to address these themes, the workshop facilitated knowledge sharing, as well as a useful discussion as to the utility of such a nexus for both research and practice.

The 15 participants from South Africa, Southern African countries such as Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique and Lesotho as well Nicaragua, Canada and the UK, all had expertise in one of the three themes. The workshop's objective was therefore to explore each of the different themes in terms of synergies and intersections with the others. This is a pioneering area of interdisciplinary research and the framing concept paper by Caroline Moser, Gina Ziervogel and Bruce Frayne is now available. More publications are planned down the line.