Science writer Leonie Joubert and climatology professor Coleen Vogel joined Our Burning Planet journalist Julia Evans in an invigorating discussion on how we can leverage the skills, knowledge and resilience we have as South Africans to prepare ourselves and our cities for the upcoming El Niño cycle, and all climate events that are likely to become more complex and threatening under climate change.

"My son always jokes, one day we'll [visit you] in the old age home, and I'll say, so did we finally create robust systems?" said Prof Coleen Vogel, a climatologist from the Global Change Institute at Wits University during a Daily Maverick webinar last week.

"But we've got to keep on going, right? Despite all the challenges that we have."

Vogel, whose research has a particular focus on disaster risk reduction and climate variability, and who was a key contributor to the writing of the Green and White Papers on South African Disaster Management, was speaking about creating disaster risk reduction systems in the face of extreme weather events that are increasing in frequency and intensity under climate change.

Vogel was joined by science writer Leonie Joubert, who has nearly 25 years of experience writing about climate change and food security issues, to discuss how the upcoming weather phenomenon, El Niño, would impact SA cities and how best we can prepare.

El Niño and its opposite, La Niña - Spanish for "little boy" and "little girl" - are opposing weather patterns that originate in the Pacific Ocean and have global effects that typically run in a three to seven-year cycle....