July 2, 2026 - Soweto, Johannesburg’s largest township, faces dual climate threats from flooding and extreme heat. These threats are compounded by the township’s soaring unemployment and an economy dominated by low-value and informal sectors. As a result, many residents have unpredictable livelihoods and limited capacity to recover from climate shocks.The Klip River system that runs through Soweto often floods during heavy rains. Without the economic resilience that comes from strong businesses and steady jobs, repairing flood-damaged homes and infrastructure can take months, leaving communities struggling to recover.Extreme heat poses another challenge. The township’s streets are getting hotter every year, and in the summer months, temperatures can reach 45 degrees C (113 degrees F), making informal jobs that require time outdoors even more gruelling.Johannesburg’s Green DivideApartheid-era development from the 1940s to the 1990s created a stark green divide across Johannesburg: a forested north and a far less-forested South, where many of the city’s townships, like Soweto, are located. Despite decades of efforts to narrow this divide, its legacy persists, leaving Johannesburg’s most vulnerable communities without the green infrastructure needed to protect them from a changing climate. Green infrastructure, including parks and trees, can help restore natural ecosystem services like microclimate regulation and soil stabilization, cooling Soweto’s neighborhoods and helping protect residents living close to the riverside. Twenty years ago, the City of Johannesburg launched the Greening Soweto Project to begin addressing these environmental challenges and bridging the city’s green divide — yet to date, the township has just 6.7% of forested land cover, far below the city’s average of 24%. A green nursery in Soweto, where many neighborhoods have limited green infrastructure. Photo by Amazon The SUNCASA project helping scale up those efforts. Working with partners, it launched a pilot tree-planting campaign in one Soweto neighborhood, planting 12,000 trees in 2025 to cool the surrounding environment.Many more neighborhoods across Soweto face the same challenges. Through its Cool Cities Lab, WRI has identified priority areas where green infrastructure can most effectively reduce heat stress and improve quality of life for an estimated 200,000 people. With funding from Amazon’s Right Now Climate fund, WRI, in collaboration with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo, Johannesburg Inner City Partnership (JICP) and GenderCC Southern Africa, are bringing green infrastructure to these priority areas by planting 20,000 trees that will provide natural climate control to heat-stressed streets and public spaces. With funding from Amazon’s Right Now Climate Fund, WRI and partners are working to bringing green infrastructure to Soweto. Photo by Amazon. This initiative will also restore 130 hectares of degraded sections of the Klip River system, improving its ecological function, reducing flood risk for Soweto’s residents and helping recharge groundwater.Moreover, the initiative will invest in local livelihoods through four new community gardens, helping unlock long-term resilience. Built and maintained by Soweto’s residents, the community gardens will help meet local dietary needs while also creating new opportunites for local entrepreneurs and helping integrate the township’s economy into the broader Johannesburg economy. Skills training in plant propagation, seedling and plant maintenance, harvesting and agro-processing to create market-ready products will equip Soweto’s women and young people with the tools they need to open green enterprises and start supplying businesses and markets across the city. Using Data to Target Greening Efforts To support evidence-based planning and long-term impact, the project is underpinned by a cloud-based urban heat data platform. Using automated data pipelines and Amazon Web Services GPU-based cloud computing, the platform will scale a high-resolution heat exposure model across Greater Johannesburg, providing a detailed understanding of where heat risks are most severe. In Soweto, it will model different tree-planting scenarios to quantify the cooling benefits of specific greening interventions, helping prioritize the city’s interventions where they can have the greatest impact. An integrated AI assistant will further democratize access to this information, enabling city planners, community organizations and other nontechnical stakeholders to query urban heat data in plain language and use these insights to inform more effective and equitable greening decisions. Ultimately, this initiative demonstrates how locally led green infrastructure can create lasting impact by combining community engagement, business development and skills transfer to strengthen local community organizations. In doing so, it offers a model for delivering nature-based solutions that address both environmental needs and real social challenges.