Drought, water management, and social equity: Analyzing Cape Town, South Africa’s water crisis
Drought, water management, and social equity: Analyzing Cape Town, South Africa’s water crisis
Cameron M. Calverley and Suzanne C. Walther* Department of Environmental and Ocean Sciences, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, United States
Until recently, Cape Town, South Africa's second largest city relied entirely on surface water for water supply. Low rainfall between 2015 and 2018 caused extreme water scarcity and water insecurity, even though the city is located on a number of significant aquifers. Water demand management measures instituted during the drought accelerated the transition to a decentralized, hybrid system. Groundwater played an important role in this transition, particularly for households, the bulk users of utility-supplied water. The current water governance and management is ill-equipped for the emergent hybrid system underpinned by an engineering approach that treats water narrowly as a resource for supply and use. This approach is problematic because it does not adequately consider water as one of multiple systems comprising the environment that supplies critical ecosystem services. Even though the City of Cape Town, as local government, effectively does not have a groundwater management role, its responsibilities for water and sanitation services, spatial planning, land-use management and environmental management all intersect with groundwater management. Significant water governance reform is therefore necessary for sustainable groundwater use and resilience in Cape Town and other South African cities.
Keywords:drought, water policy, equity, Day Zero, Cape Town
Introduction
Cape Town is located in Sub-Saharan Africa with unprecedented rates of urban growth creating significant challenges for spatial and utility service planners (Saghir and Santoro, 2018). Cape Town's own population growth is just under 2.57% but is expected to accelerate over the next 5 years with the addition of an estimated 400,000 residents to the current almost 4.7 million. Current service backlogs are expected to increase, exacerbating already constrained service provision. Whilst ongoing urban agglomeration in the global south presents opportunities for sustainable just transitions on the one hand, on the other, there is a heightened risk for those living in cities, particularly as climate change shocks and stresses increase in intensity and frequency. The unprecedented 1:590 year drought (City of Cape Town, 2019a) experienced between 2015 and 2018 that impacted the surface-dependent Western Cape Water Supply System (WCWSS) is a case in point. The National Department of Water and Sanitation (NDWS) as the regulator and raw water supplier, and the City of Cape Town (the water utility) introduced water restrictions as rainfall and dam levels dropped, in addition to a water conservation and demand management (WCDM) strategy–particularly focused on households who use 70% of the total water supply.
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