Cape Town’ s water crisis— most popular topic at WISA 2018
A number of foreign visitors were so sceptical about attending a water conference in Cape Town with Day Zero looming, that they threatened to cancel.
By Helgard Muller, Pr Eng
The Theewaterskloof Dam at the height of the drought, on 25 January 2018, in Villiersdorp.
Fortunately, local contacts reassured them and, in the end, the visitors stated their pleasure in coming. The biannual WISA conference held in Cape Town, in June 2018, was indeed very successful. Here are several points that I picked up in the sessions and workshops.
As can be expected, the Cape Town water crisis was a major feature of the conference and many presentations focused on what can be learnt from this experience. The announcement of Day Zero was a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it shocked the residents into commitment to save water, but it was also a severe blow to the tourism industry. One example: a B & B establishment stated that they started to receive cancellations immediately after the announcement of Day Zero and lost five months of revenue.( See ed.’ s winning letter in Around the Water Cooler).
Premier Helen Zille, at the opening ceremony, made a few remarks that stood out:
• She, as well as the mayor of Cape Town, was faced with the dilemma:“ Who do you listen to in a crisis?” Politicians found themselves amid all and sundry who wanted to advise and bring their quick-fix solutions. Zille found that“ many of these so-called experts were merely trying to sell a product”. Subsequently,“ the quality of your officials becomes very important” as they must guide government’ s decisions through this maze of advice from outside.
• Lessons learnt from Australia were“ not to jump to massive desalination plants as these are built at an excessive cost and when the rains and floods eventually follow the drought, government will be blamed for these huge white elephants”.
• Zille reflected that the Cape Town water crisis was also a good thing, as it has drastically changed perceptions about water— not only in the Western Cape but also in South Africa as a whole.
• Another positive result was that many new and ingenious ways were developed to save and reuse water at household level. Unfortunately, this poses a new challenge to the Cape Town municipality: as more households switch to on-site sources, the demand on the municipal water supply system drops. The problem arises that it is the more affluent who can afford to go off the system and the poor are then left with a municipal water supply at a higher unit cost. This creates greater disparities in a society already skewed.
The speech by Samantha Yates( secretary general of the Global Water Leaders Group, or GWLG) was just another example of how many researchers now zoom in to learn from the Cape Town crisis as a case study.
She referred to a report published by the GWLG, titled A perfect storm— the hydropolitics of Cape Town’ s water crisis.
The following is an abstract from this report:
What the Cape Town crisis shows is that preparing for drought requires a team effort— evidence-based science, pressure from the public, and political will. Cape Town’ s perfect storm was driven by the mismanagement of funds and a lack of political will, coupled with environmental factors, which all contributed to one of the most severe urban droughts in modern history. The interplay of South African politics with environmental factors has led to a‘ perfect storm’ in Cape Town( Figure 1).
36 Water Sewage & Effluent September / October 2018