PROPERTY & INVESTMENT
Water Shortages in South Africa
ENVIRONMENTAL OR MISMANAGEMENT ?
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South Africa is currently experiencing a wave of infrastructure failures , reflecting most noticeably as the load shedding for electricity , and disruptions to water supply and sanitation . This begs the question as to what the root cause might be .
There have been three NWRS documents published , but only the first is accurate enough to be regarded for planning purposes . NWRS 1 was produced when South Africa still had robust science , engineering , and technology capability , which meant that the numbers generated for each of the 19 Water Management Areas ( WMAs ) are the most reliable . NWRS 2 and 3 merely rehashed the data from NWRS 1 , in part because the technical capacity to upgrade the original data has simply been lost .
12 I N F R A S T R U C T U R E
In the case of water , that answer is best found in the National Water Resource Strategy ( NWRS ) first published around 2002 . This is an official document , mandated by the National Water Act , designed to present the most accurate audit of water resource availability countrywide . The intention was to enable the NWRS to give decisionmakers an accurate assessment of the present and future trends on the supply side of the equation . This was supposed to be mediated by Catchment Management Agencies ( CMAs ), also mandated by the National Water Act ( NWA ), as they engage in the complex political deliberations presented in the Independent Development Plans ( IDPs ), mandated by the Municipal Systems Act . We can think of the IDPs as the demand side of the equation . It is logical to assume that normal human behaviour would dictate that the IDP is an aspirational document , typically representing planned demand that does not yet exist . This aspiration must be married up with the reality of actual water availability , which is why the NWRS is so important .
NWRS 1 can be summarised in this image ( see page 14 ), which shows the future situation in 2025 , as projected off the baseline data used for that study . The total national water deficit was projected to be 2,044 million cubic metres ( MCM ) per annum . However , the devil is always in the detail , so the Upper Vaal and the Mvoti to Umzimkulu WMAs were both projected to be in deficit of just below 800 MCM , with the Berg in deficit of over 500 MCM . The only WMA that was projected to be in surplus by 2025 is the Crocodile West and Marico , with 335 MCM derived from sewage return flows out of Gauteng .
Stated differently , in 2002 South Africa became a fundamentally water-constrained economy , with the NWRS 1 showing that we had already allocated 98 % of all the water we had , with some WMAs being over-allocated by as much as 120 %. This answers part of the question posed above . South Africa has simply reached the limit of its development potential , assuming that water resources are managed the way they have been for the last 120 years .