Placing this situation in some context.
As the stresses of a diminishing water supply manifest themselves, some folks will inevitably cast around for persons or entities to blame. Permit me to add some context for the debate.
Capture/storage/supply of bulk water is actually a central government responsibility, while metros are responsible for treatment and distribution of water allocated to them by government as well as for disposal of waste. Cities simply cannot roam around building dams and interfering with the water rights of others. This must be centrally regulated.
Local population growth is inevitable. Older readers will remember when the population of Cape Town was well below a million people, and now stands at nearly 4 million; a result of the global trend toward urbanisation and the special issue of movement of population groups in South Africa. This is neither to be halted nor deflected, and must be accommodated through extensive new water projects.
Climate change is likely to result in an increasing frequency of increasingly longer dry spells in the Western Cape. Under usual circumstances the storage of surface (rainfall run-off) in existing dams has in the past provided sufficient potable water. However, as bulk water storage possibilities are now essentially exhausted, other more innovative forms of fresh water production have become essential.
Cape Town City is currently using less water than it is allocated by way of bulk supply from DWS. The basic problem is that DWS is unable to deliver that allocation of bulk water supplies. The City has actually been doing the only thing that it independently could do within its powers, namely increasing water efficiency (reducing waste and losses) while progressively reducing potable water demand.
The looming problem of insufficient water across SW Cape has been identified and studied for decades. Clearly, at various points over past years decisions were taken, based on then prevailing priorities and budgets, to rely on average weather patterns to estimate supply while restricting consumption to strike the balance from time to time when existing stored supplies fell short. And it worked through to 2014 when the dams last overflowed.
But looking back through the 20:20 lens of the current drought, it can now be seen that logic was faulty and risky – at some point constantly growing population pressure would inevitably outstrip not only the total water storage capacity but worse, the total amount of surface water available from rain falling in the catchments.
A 20-year plan to resolve this does exist. It includes all the interventions now being actioned but with hindsight, implementation by central DWS, the City and other metros may be judged to have been too slow. The resulting vulnerability has been exposed by this current 100-year+ extreme drought.
So the City of Cape Town is now (perhaps somewhat belatedly) intervening and taking it upon itself to do what it can to mitigate the situation. In doing so it’s concentrating on those aspects within its jurisdiction (e.g. recycling, temporary desalination, groundwater abstraction) but in order to do so still needs to navigate many environmental regulations.
In summary then, the history is complex and past decisions, good and bad, local and non-local, have brought us to where we are. The short-term problem is survival. Although it is not yet clear if the severity of this drought can be linked to climate change, gratifyingly CoCT is approaching the problem with the intention, this time, of also permanently addressing the long-term strategic water needs. Hopefully they will get appropriate central government support to do so.
Sign up with Google