Tucked into the second floor of the University of Cape Town’s New Engineering Building lies an eclectic collection of thinkers— economists, engineers and designers. They make up the Future Water Institute. One of several key organizations tasked with envisioning long-term solutions to the ongoing crisis, their knowledge of the region’s water supply is deep, spanning decades of research, data and analysis.

 

One of these researchers, Dr. Kirsty Carden, has been studying the region’s water supply issues for decades. She says South Africa’s water issues date back far longer than most Capetonians realize— in fact, the city has been aware of, and planning for, water shortages for quite some time.

 

“South Africa is a water-scarce country,” she says. “We have half the world’s average rainfall per year, about 450 mm. With the impacts of climate change it appears that the country will get hotter and drier, particularly on the Western side.” Because of population increases and warming trends, she says, the city of Cape Town had already been planning to revamp its water system through a dam augmentation scheme in 2020. What they couldn’t plan for—or predict—was the historic drought that began in 2015.

 

“The scientists are saying it’s a one in 400 year to one in 1000 year [occurrence],” she says. “Something we’ve never seen the likes of before.”

 

Nobody realized the true scope of the shortages right away. And while the city began imposing restrictions in 2016, she says, many citizens didn’t follow them. Not until the idea of “Day Zero” did Capetonians truly get onboard with the conservation efforts, and even then, Mayor Patricia De Lille had to warn that the apocalyptic scenario was just around the corner—which had a mixed effect, Carden says.

 

“She came out in mid-January…very strongly, saying ‘Day Zero is no longer a possibility, it’s a probability, and if we don’t do something we will run out of water,” Carden says. “So there was a bit of fear-mongering.” People rushed out and bought tons of bottled water, rainwater tanks, and installed their own greywater systems—says Carden, “There was a run on every bit of plastic in the city.”

 

But as sensationalistic as the Mayor’s January announcement was, Carden says, at least it worked. “It certainly elicited a massive response,” she says. “In retrospect, what else could they have done? With a population that did not appear to be sticking to the restricted amounts?” The current amount the city has saved, she says, is “nothing short of remarkable.”

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A source who plays an advisory role to key government personnel— who spoke candidly on the condition of anonymity—expressed his frustration with the way politicians framed the crisis. “The Day Zero scenario was never going to happen,” he says. “It was a patently false narrative.” The community responded strongly to the message, and their responses weren’t all productive.

 

“There was a lot of panic in the system,” he continues, echoing Carden. “Middle class households ... started buying copious bottles of water from the supermarkets, creating massive queues and causing shops to run out of water.” Responses by individuals have also had mixed results, they say: the installation of rainwater tanks and greywater systems has eased the pressure on the municipal water system, but borehole digging, though it has also helped conserve current supply, has begun depleting the city’s groundwater reserves.

 

Although Carden and the government advisor disagree with how the government handled the messaging around the water crisis, they do agree that the severity of the drought—and yes, the accompanying narrative of Day Zero—has successfully motivated Capetonians in both public and private roles to pay attention.  

 

Now that the crisis has settled in, what’s next? Scientists and policy makers alike are working around the clock: both to pinpoint the long-term issues, and come up with the best remedies, both legislative and scientific, to address them.

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One major issue, note Carden and other experts, is that up until now, Cape Town’s water provisions have come almost exclusively from six dams around the city.

 

The biggest of these, supplying nearly half of total supply, is Theewaterskloof, a massive reserve about two hours outside of the city. With its reservoir at around 11 percent of its total capacity in March, down from 75 percent in 2014, Theewaterskloof now looks less like a dam than a puddle-strewn valley. Beached boats lie strewn on the newly-emerged shore. Usually a bustling hub of sailors and kayakers, today only the most loyal handful of club members—like Sue and Nigel, who’ve been coming to the dam since 1990—sit at the Club’s polished mahogany bar, eating egg sandwiches and bemoaning their plight.

 

“We’ve had years where the water is … right up to the tree lines,” Sue says, motioning outside to a line far above the puddles. “So it’s pretty devastating, as you can see.” To race their yachts, the couple now has to walk more than a kilometer across the sand.

 

It’s not just the reservoir levels that are decreasing over time—so is the public’s willingness to do anything about it. Dr. Carden keeps a close eye on weekly water usage reports provided by the city of Cape Town. The first few weeks after the government announced Day Zero’s postponement, usage edged up again, she says.

 

Ironically, the main reason behind local apathy is the good news: On March 8, the city’s website announced Day Zero had been delayed to 2019, thanks in large part to drastic reductions in water usage by various consumers, from farmers to tourists to businesspeople. But saving water isn’t fun or exciting, especially once emergency gives way to status quo. “I do wonder about the public response about Day Zero but the city couldn’t have done it another way, Once they were supplying the information to people they couldn’t take it away. It remains to be seen” whether the messaging will be effective in the long-term.  

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So far, the city’s communications teams have not come up with any viable solutions to address citizens’ flagging energy, other than continuing to paste signs all over the city reminding Capetonians to save water. Signs at airport bathrooms remind people to catch water they use for handwashing in a sink-sized plastic bin, which cleaners would then recycle for toilet flushing. One recent campaign at the University of Cape Town featured a catchy rhyme-- “Be a Hero, Avoid Day Zero”-- that students like to repeat in a laughing sing-song.

 

And of course, climate change has certainly contributed to the decrease in Cape Town’s overall annual rainfall rate. Regions across the world are seeing precipitation changes, many of which seem to be climate change-driven. In California, for example, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have found a connection between melting Arctic sea ice and reduced precipitation: using complex simulations, they predict these effects could diminish precipitation over California by as much as 15% over the next 20-30 years.

 

Other water-strapped cities, like Jakarta, Indonesia, are seeing lower rainfall: According to data visualizations published by the World Food Program, the city’s encompassing district saw just 245 mm of rainfall in January 2018 and 195 mm in January 2016, compared to an average of 389.9 mm since 1981.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Back in the late 1990s, water expert Guy Preston was attempting to solve a different water crisis in the Western Cape that was affecting Hermanus, a small town 100 km down the coast from Cape Town. An employee of the former minister of water affairs, he found himself even then questioning the wisdom of trying to store more water before conserving it.

 

“They were talking about increasing the dam wall, or bringing in water from Theewaterskloof,” he said, referring to Cape Town’s largest dam. Instead, Preston and his team members proposed a plan that addressed how the townspeople were using the water they already had—an approach known as  “demand side management.” Chief among his plan’s major points was a “block grade tariff,” which addresses demand by instituting a fixed water cost per household. It works like this: After consuming a certain number of kl/month, the cost of each kiloliter of water increases. Then after several more kiloliters at this price, you reach a new limit, and the price per kiloliter jumps again. In essence, Preston says, this makes paying for water more fair, because “It’s the big users who are driving the need for increasing the [supply] side, bringing water from Theewaterskloof, or options like groundwater The notion was, those driving marginal cost pay marginal price.”  

 

This worked in Hermanus: Preston’s plan lowered the city’s overall water use by 32 percent, and 96 percent of residents polled responded positively to the new system, he says.

 

Preston pushed for this in Cape Town, but it took the city months—during which they suffered from a lack of public response to other efforts — for it to finally agree. Today, Cape Town operates on a block tariff, with basic (up to 6 kiloliters) free for the poorest, or ‘indigent,’ households.

 

One issue with this, as some have pointed out, is that the blocks are based off estimated needs for Cape Town’s average household size— about four per household citywide. However, lower-income households often have a household size that’s larger than four. This makes some families hard-pressed to meet the water use maximums for certain blocks and keep their costs reasonable.

 

Preston says the city has a way to manage this—if you have a larger household, you can apply to have additional water without extra charges. But it’s hard to process these applications and spread awareness about them, so most likely, these block grade tariffs are disproportionately impacting some lower-income families.

 

Demand-side management has helped the city so far, but it won’t fix all of Cape Town’s water problems, say Preston and other experts. After all, citizens in other cities waste water with far fewer consequences. So the city is also focusing on “supply-side” efforts to augment the city’s water supply.

 

In the future, Preston says, the city may need to consider all potential augmentation methods—from the typical alternative of using more ground water to the far-out, like towing icebergs from Antarctica. Yes, you read that right.

 

“It’s been done from the Arctic to the Middle East,” Preston says. “But I think it’s a long time before we have to resort to that.”  

 

One solution is to build more dams. This would allow Cape Town to get more water without radically altering its water systems. However, dam-building is often controversial, especially when it involves relocating communities, and Preston says most of the best dam placements are already taken.

 

Another approach, desalination, involves processing massive amounts of saltwater and turning it into drinkable water. This has gotten lots of press attention as a seemingly inexhaustible supply source, but there are a few problems with it as well. Desalination is almost prohibitively expensive and labor-intensive. It also leaves behind massive amounts of salty waste that is difficult, and pricey, to dispose of.

 

A third method, groundwater extraction, focuses on making use of the city’s groundwater reserves by removing invasive species from natural ‘water catchments,’ areas of land where water pools, and from which the city draws. Invasive species suck the catchments dry. “The amount of water that’s running down there is nothing like what it would be if we cleared the catchment,” says Dr. Guy Preston, director of the city’s “Working for Water” program. The program that employs lower-income Capetonians to remove invasive species from aquifers was started all the way back in 1995 to try and address water scarcity and unemployment at the same time.  The women of Atlantis are a recent example.

 

Although no studies have captured just exactly how much water Preston’s program is saving, the problem it’s addressing is certainly worth his attention: In 2007, researchers in the Western Cape estimated that invasive alien plants in mountain catchment areas and riparian zones alone result in a 695 million m3 loss in yield, or 4.1% of the registered total water use. Invasive plants in other areas suck away still more water.   

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So much of an urban crisis comes from the city itself: how it’s laid out, how it’s managed, how it’s used. And in Cape Town another, different sort of crisis period has influenced this one, in ways both visible and underground. From the city’s layout to the quality of pipes, solution-seekers say, apartheid haunts the city’s water supply, increasing the likelihood of Day Zero with everything it touches.

 

“Look,” Carden says. “We’re stuck with a history [that] the city and the province are, in some respects, trying to overcome. But we haven’t really moved beyond the apartheid-segregated cities that we had 20 years ago.”

 

She’s worried. Cape Town is growing, but not in a sustainable way. The city’s layout has changed little since apartheid days—sprawling and segregated, it makes for a complex, expensive and often inefficient water grid.

 

“We can’t keep expanding the city, the footprint of the city, the way we’re doing it,” she says. “We need to be much more compact, much more integrated.”

 

In addition to the distribution schema, Preston notes, shoddy construction of homes in non-white areas have led to weak, mostly corroded piping in those areas. This has led to an overabundance of unnecessary, expensive leakages and bursts—like the one outside of Faldielah Fakeh’s home.  “To treat water and lose up to 40 percent of it to leaks, that doesn’t make sense,” Carden says.

 

Preston notes that although apartheid has led to water wastage, poverty is, unfortunately, the city’s biggest saving mechanism at this point. Throughout the crisis, water use experts have stressed that those dwelling in informal settlements are by far Cape Town’s best water savers—they comprise 25% of the city’s population, but only use about 5% of the city’s water overall. Preston and others don’t want these people to stay poor, but as the city’s own data shows, the richer you are, the more water you likely use: therefore, increases in average water use mean Capetonians are likely getting wealthier overall. So they are faced with a challenging, but exciting, task: their solutions must simultaneously decrease the city’s overall water use and increase service delivery to its populous bottom line.

 

As Preston says: “With increasing population, as we do have, and increasing affluence, as we must have—greater equity in this very unequal country—you have to expect that…more amounts of water [will be] needed.”

 

To save Cape Town from Day Zero, in other words, experts believe the city must be remade, from an apartheid-segregated sprawl into an equitable and efficient metropolis. The work would be arduous, but the reward potentially massive and multifaceted.

 

And that’s the thing about water—it touches life on every level.