City of Cape Town's Water Map

Sinclair-Smith, Ken; Mosdell, Susan; Kaiser, Gisela; Lalla, Ziyaad; September, Leandre; Mubadiro, Collin; Rushmere, Sarah; Roderick, Katherine; Brühl, Johanna; McLaren, Megan; Visser, Martine

doi:10.1002/awwa.1154

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…The undertaking of costly adaptations represents one way that the drought exposed infrastructural failures to the public and fostered unprecedented awareness of water as potentially scarce for these elite. The legibility of water scarcity for this group stemmed, too, from Cape Town's Water Map: an “innovative and somewhat controversial behavior modification tool” through which Capetonians monitored household‐level compliance with restrictions across the city through an open‐access online spatial viewer (Sinclair‐Smith et al., 2018, p. 62). The map facilitated not only practical measurement and monitoring but also social comparison, as residents viewed their peers' water use data freely (Sinclair‐Smith et al., 2018).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The legibility of water scarcity for this group stemmed, too, from Cape Town's Water Map: an “innovative and somewhat controversial behavior modification tool” through which Capetonians monitored household‐level compliance with restrictions across the city through an open‐access online spatial viewer (Sinclair‐Smith et al., 2018, p. 62). The map facilitated not only practical measurement and monitoring but also social comparison, as residents viewed their peers' water use data freely (Sinclair‐Smith et al., 2018). In these ways, the Day Zero crisis forged a particular experience of awareness around water availability among the privileged minority that was previously reserved for the non‐White majority (Robins, 2019).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Communicationbased "Save Our Water" campaign-mostly leveraged conservation tips (Liang et al, 2018) Collection and communication of household water use data constrained by privacy mentality "Day Zero" campaign-"apocalyptic" rhetoric, numbers-based (Voci et al, 2020;Walwema, 2021) Water Dashboard (City of Cape Town, n.d.; Joubert & Ziervogel, 2019) Cape Town Water Map, launched Jan 2018 (Sinclair-Smith et al, 2018) Technical/ infrastructural Reduced volumes of water deliveries from the state's major water projects (Lund et al, 2018) Installation of water management devices (WMDs) expanded to high-income households (Bischoff-Mattson et al, 2020;DWS, 2018) Pressure management: Reduced rate of flow to lessen volume of water residents could access quickly and minimized amount lost to leaks (DWS, 2018)…”

Section: Case Selection: California United States and Western Cape So...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Whose water crisis? How policy responses to acute environmental change widen inequality

David,

Hughes

2023

Policy Studies Journal

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Policy responses to the challenges associated with environmental change, including more frequent and severe climatic events, have interlinked environmental and social impacts. Less attention has been afforded to the latter, and specifically to the question of not just whether but how such responses create or entrench inequality. This paper examines policy responses to drought events in California, United States, and the Western Cape Province, South Africa, in terms of their effects on inequality, revealed in relationships to water access networks. We use concepts of water justice and hydraulic citizenship to evaluate how and why these policy responses reproduced water injustices in the two settings. We focus particularly on two mechanisms linking responses to widened inequalities: values‐reinforcement and strategic communication. Using interviews, policy documents, and media reports, we employ process tracing methods to illustrate these mechanisms through which drought policy impacts hydraulic citizenship experiences, manifesting water injustice. We contribute to emerging examinations of environmental policy responses and maladaptation by demonstrating how concepts of hydraulic citizenship and an emphasis on mechanisms can help us better understand and identify experiences of water injustice. We note policy implications and areas for future research, highlighting droughts as consequential policy sites for advancing social and environmental justice.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Case Selection: California United States and Western Cape So...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Whose water crisis? How policy responses to acute environmental change widen inequality

David,

Hughes

2023

Policy Studies Journal

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“…Superada la crisis, y por las circunstancias socioeconómicas de Ciudad del Cabo, la desalación sigue sin contemplarse. Pero, con el objetivo de ahuyentar un futuro día cero, se ha diseñado un ambicioso plan (Sinclair-Smith et al, 2018) que premia a los abonados que van reduciendo su consumo habitual.…”

Section: La Desalación Como Garantía De Suministrounclassified

Pasado, presente y futuro de la desalación en España

2019

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<p>Se repasa, en el marco del contexto mundial, la evolución de la desalación en España. Una historia de más de medio siglo que arrancó donde el agua más escasea, en las Islas Canarias. Lo que comenzó siendo una solución puntual para resolver problemas concretos ha ido, al compás de los avances tecnológicos, de la reducción de costes y del control de su impacto, ganando relevancia. Pero hace quince años, el ritmo de implantación, se aceleró notablemente. En aquel contexto se tomaron rápidas decisiones, adoptadas sin el amplio consenso que requieren este tipo de infraestructuras. Sin embargo, la madurez tecnológica y, sobre todo, el tiempo están contribuyendo a clarificar la situación, propiciando que cada desaladora encuentre su lugar y, en fin, justificando la fuerte inversión efectuada. Con todo hay problemas aún pendientes de solución, en particular la incorporación de esta nueva fuente de agua en un sistema que integre todos los recursos, tanto los tradicionales como los nuevos. Ello exige que los usuarios acepten su sobrecoste como un nuevo seguro hídrico que permita garantizar el suministro de agua en todo momento. En cualquier caso, hay que concluir que la desalación en España juega, y continuará jugando un papel clave en el litoral mediterráneo y en algunas de sus islas más turísticas.</p>

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“…Water prices also increased substantially throughout the drought, as we discuss more below. At the same time, the City increased its efforts to raise water conservation awareness and to inform the public about the severity of the drought (Booysen et al, 2019;Sinclair-Smith et al, 2018;Ziervogel, 2018). All interventions combined led to a more than 50% decrease in consumption in less than three years (Brühl & Visser, 2021;Muller, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributional Statistics of Municipal Water Use During Cape Town's Drought: Implications for Affordability, Conservation, and Tariffs

Cook

Brühl

Visser

2021

Water Resources Research

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Municipal water utilities around the globe face a daunting set of challenges. In high-income countries, they must maintain piped networks that deliver high quality, reliable water supply to homes and remove household waste via piped sewerage networks. In most cities in low-and middle-income countries, they must improve the quality and reliability of services, connect households to the network, and plan for large population influxes. Utilities need financial resources to attack these problems, but tariffs in many places are too low: only 35% of utilities in the World Bank's International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities database collect enough revenue to cover operations and maintenance costs, and only 14% collect enough to cover the full economic cost of service provision, including the cost of capital (Andres et al., 2019). Support for tariff reforms, however, depends on effectively protecting poor customers. Furthermore, "affordability" is explicitly mentioned in many of the Sustainable Development Goals, including access to "affordable" housing, energy, health care and water and sanitation services. A common policy prescription among water tariff consultants is to balance the objectives of affordability, efficiency and revenue stability with increasing-block tariffs, where the marginal price of water increases with increasing use. Because it is assumed that the highest water users are also the wealthiest, it is commonly believed that this tariff can in theory redirect revenue from wealthier households and cross-subsidize lower rates for low-income households, who are assumed to use less water. In practice, these tariff policies have been shown to do a poor job of directing subsidies to the poor in many low-income countries, in part because the correlation between income and water use is weaker than commonly believed (Burger & Jansen, 2014;Fuente et al., 2016). Utilities are increasingly experimenting with other types of "customer assistance programs" to help the poor (Cook et al., 2020). These include providing a free or subsidized "lifeline" quantity of water to poor customers, a policy that many cities in South Africa have employed as part of the country's Free Basic Water program (

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City of Cape Town's Water Map

Abstract: The Cape Town Water Map is an innovative and somewhat controversial behavior‐modification tool implemented to reduce water use in a drought‐stricken region.

Cited by 6 publications

References 3 publications

Whose water crisis? How policy responses to acute environmental change widen inequality

Whose water crisis? How policy responses to acute environmental change widen inequality

Pasado, presente y futuro de la desalación en España

Distributional Statistics of Municipal Water Use During Cape Town's Drought: Implications for Affordability, Conservation, and Tariffs

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