Towards a water secure future: reflections on Cape Town’s Day Zero crisis

Abstract

Capetonians have relied on dams to meet their needs for over a century. Extremely limited rainfall between 2015-2018, however, forced the City to impose a 50-litres per capita per day water restriction on its four million residents to avoid supply cutoffs. Cape Town's water crisis highlights the importance of moving away from past infrastructural practices. South Africa needs a new water paradigm that embeds water sustainability and resilience in day-today practices that, inter alia, protects the natural water systems and ensures a sustainable water supply through reducing the environmental footprint of a growing population and developing alternative supply systems to dam infrastructure. To accomplish this, government, the private sector and consumers need to work together to develop and implement a water sensitive approach that will transform water planning, supply and demand at scale.

Localize the Impact of Global Greenhouse Gases Emissions under an Uncertain Future: A Case Study in Western Cape, South Africa

“…Carbon-capture technologies may be a more localized approach; however, these require global cooperation and collaboration to reach the level of significance. For improving water-usage efficiency, this requires citizens and government to adopt a water-sensitive approach in city planning and development that could include shifting water-management paradigms, developing new governance mechanisms, and guiding diversification of water supplies to provide resilience to potential future climate shocks [35]. In the meantime, local government should explore interventions that promote and proactively encourage behavioral change and address inequity regarding water rights [35].…”

Conversations About Climate Risk, Adaptation and Resilience in Africa

“…The Day Zero water supply crisis in Cape Town received global media coverage, prompting intense debate over the role of drought and water resource management decisions and infrastructure prior to and during the crisis (e.g. Taing et al 2019 ). The event exemplifies how poverty mediates the ways in which exposure translates into impacts, the complex and often contested causal pathways between climate hazards and their human consequences, and the windows of opportunity for learning and policy response that extreme events provide.…”

Resource-conscious urban planning and design : Exploring the potential of urban metabolism assessments

“…Various factors seem to have contributed to causing this unprecedented situation (Muller, 2019;Taing et al, 2019). Although the water crisis in Cape Town became particularly known when the threat of waterless taps was in view, the period of water shortage had already started in 2015 and the city had water restrictions in place since November 2016 (Booysen et al, 2019;Muller, 2019).…”

“…On the demand side, the growing urban population and the increasing water demand from various sectors may have contributed to the water crisis (Taing et al, 2019). On the supply side, the crisis can be partly attributed to severely low rainfall in the period between 2015 -2017, whilst alternative supply options to the rainfall-dependent ones were absent (Taing et al, 2019;Wolski, 2018;Zhang et al, 2019). So, management-related vulnerabilities coincided with severe and rare climatic conditions (Muller, 2019).…”