Cape Town's Water Crisis of 2018
In the previous post, I explained the reasons why I chose the topic "Water and Politics" for this blog. There is one reason I didn't mention and it is the subject of this second post.
For months this year, the media described Cape Town's water crisis; how close the city has been to reaching Day Zero, the tipping-point when water recharges would be so low that the taps would have to be turned off and people would be sent to communal water points (Mahr 2018), and how Cape Town was the first big city to reach such high levels of water stress, and will necessarily be followed by many more cities as a consequence of climate change. This fatalist information got me desperate and angry, but also a bit suspicious (was there really nothing to do to solve the problem??) so I decided that it would be the subject of my first post here. Interestingly, my findings are both reassuring and alarming: they basically point to the complexity of the issue, meaning there are plenty of options to solve, or mitigate, the problems, but it requires urgent, long-term-oriented, and diversified action.
Institutional ineffectiveness
Looking at institutional aspects, one may notice many areas of poor and inadequate management of water supply. For example, Ziervogel, Shale & Du (2011) found in a case-study of Cape Town's climate change adaptation capacities that water access was being impeded or hindered, not by unawareness of the problem, but rather by a fundamental lack of practical management efficiency. Though water is recognized as a basic right in the constitution, its access for everyone is mostly prevented by the absence of good communicational channels between the water sector and the government and of a clear definition of who is in charge of what (Ziervogel, Shale & Du, 2011). It is also hindered by bad decisions as to where to allocate resources: for example, the significant share (grossly 1/3) allocated to the agricultural sector has received extensive critics for being unsustainable as it drastically limits the amount of drinking water (Olivier, 2017). Thus, by delimitating each party's clear functions and encouraging closer cooperation among the various institutions, the government could allow for a much sounder and fairer water policy which would increase people's support and help asserting its own local and national power.
Similarly, the civil society group South African Water Caucus exposes the very poor conditions of water resources management in their own country, notably in terms of financial management. It draws attention to the many irregular and unauthorized expenditure by the ministry, as well as to the lack of adequate control to prevent this. These concerning facts were expressed by the Auditor-General of South Africa and transcribed in the SAWC report (SAWC, 2017). What is more, the report also highlights the government's corrupt practices, which are yet another obstacle preventing it from reaching a sound policy of water security (SAWC, 2017).
These two papers underscore the primary role of institutions in securing access to safe water. They also provide some elements of response as to whether or not the crisis that happened in Cape Town earlier this year was mostly attributable to (by definition, hard to predict) climate change hazards.
At the root of the crisis: a political dispute
To answer this last question, it is interesting to take a specific aspect into account: namely, the large political isolation of the Western Cape, Cape Town's administrative region, from the rest of the country. As it happens, the region is the only one governed by the Democratic Alliance not by the African National Congress. In order to keep the power, the ANC deliberately isolates the Western Cape so as to weaken its adversary party (Saunderson-Meyer 2018). This reduces the potential for political cooperation between the local and the national levels, which in turn makes it harder to develop pre-emptive and proactive answers to key issues like this one.
In this case, this adverse impact is particularly strong: as early as 2007, a warning was issued by the national Department of Water and Sanitation saying that Cape Town's resources were low and necessitated urgent action. The local authority responded very rapidly and most objectives were met three years early. In 2015, following a major drought that hit the Western Cape, the provincial government asked the national one for an increase in subsidies to improve the sustainability of its water management. Yet the despite evidence, national government refused on the grounds that Cape Town was "not yet at crisis level", and there is widely shared suspicion that this answer was one more way to isolate the DA (see, among others, Olivier 2017 and Saunderson-Meyer 2018). Therefore, had the issue of water scarcity been handled effectively, cooperatively and with a long-term vision going beyond political conflicts, Cape Town would have been much better prepared and very probably wouldn't have been so close to reaching Day Zero.
Furthermore, although climate hazards are not always predictable, it appears clearly that this one was, and had been predicted long ago, but that a lack of political will and institutional effectiveness impeded its resolution.
Conclusion: the central role of sound policies in the management of water resources
Eventually, day zero was not reached. But this was only made possible by the quick implementation of a set of drastic measures strictly restricting the use of water to 50L/person/day (Mahr, 2018). This short-term, emergency policy didn't erase the risk of water scarcity, which means day zero could still happen later if no long-term-oriented measures are taken. In other words, because of institutional inefficiency and political pettiness, the costs of climate change and growing demand for water had to be borne by citizens. This is certainly not acceptable for the future, as it undermines both people's rights to be protected, and the state's legitimacy which is mainly based on guaranteeing the security of its citizens. Therefore in future, drawing from the nearly-catastrophic experience of Cape Town, the focus should be put on improving the ecological and political sustainability of water resources management.
Sarah Champagne
References:
Mahr (2018): "How Cape Town was saved from running out of water" in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/04/back-from-the-brink-how-cape-town-cracked-its-water-crisis
Olivier (2017): "Cape Town's Water Crisis: Driven by politics more than drought" in The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/cape-towns-water-crisis-driven-by-politics-more-than-drought-88191
Saunderson-Meyer (2018): "Commentary: In-drought hits South Africa, the politics of water", in Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saundersonmeyer-drought-commentary/commentary-in-drought-hit-south-africa-the-politics-of-water-idUSKBN1FP226
South African Water Caucus (2017): Report on the state of the department of water and sanitation, http://emg.org.za/images/downloads/water_cl_ch/SAWC_State-of-DWS-Report.pdf
Ziervogel, Shale, Du (2011): Climate Change adaptation in a developing country context: the case of urban water supply in Cape Town, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3763/cdev.2010.0036
For months this year, the media described Cape Town's water crisis; how close the city has been to reaching Day Zero, the tipping-point when water recharges would be so low that the taps would have to be turned off and people would be sent to communal water points (Mahr 2018), and how Cape Town was the first big city to reach such high levels of water stress, and will necessarily be followed by many more cities as a consequence of climate change. This fatalist information got me desperate and angry, but also a bit suspicious (was there really nothing to do to solve the problem??) so I decided that it would be the subject of my first post here. Interestingly, my findings are both reassuring and alarming: they basically point to the complexity of the issue, meaning there are plenty of options to solve, or mitigate, the problems, but it requires urgent, long-term-oriented, and diversified action.
Credits: RTS Info
Institutional ineffectiveness
Looking at institutional aspects, one may notice many areas of poor and inadequate management of water supply. For example, Ziervogel, Shale & Du (2011) found in a case-study of Cape Town's climate change adaptation capacities that water access was being impeded or hindered, not by unawareness of the problem, but rather by a fundamental lack of practical management efficiency. Though water is recognized as a basic right in the constitution, its access for everyone is mostly prevented by the absence of good communicational channels between the water sector and the government and of a clear definition of who is in charge of what (Ziervogel, Shale & Du, 2011). It is also hindered by bad decisions as to where to allocate resources: for example, the significant share (grossly 1/3) allocated to the agricultural sector has received extensive critics for being unsustainable as it drastically limits the amount of drinking water (Olivier, 2017). Thus, by delimitating each party's clear functions and encouraging closer cooperation among the various institutions, the government could allow for a much sounder and fairer water policy which would increase people's support and help asserting its own local and national power.
Similarly, the civil society group South African Water Caucus exposes the very poor conditions of water resources management in their own country, notably in terms of financial management. It draws attention to the many irregular and unauthorized expenditure by the ministry, as well as to the lack of adequate control to prevent this. These concerning facts were expressed by the Auditor-General of South Africa and transcribed in the SAWC report (SAWC, 2017). What is more, the report also highlights the government's corrupt practices, which are yet another obstacle preventing it from reaching a sound policy of water security (SAWC, 2017).
These two papers underscore the primary role of institutions in securing access to safe water. They also provide some elements of response as to whether or not the crisis that happened in Cape Town earlier this year was mostly attributable to (by definition, hard to predict) climate change hazards.
At the root of the crisis: a political dispute
To answer this last question, it is interesting to take a specific aspect into account: namely, the large political isolation of the Western Cape, Cape Town's administrative region, from the rest of the country. As it happens, the region is the only one governed by the Democratic Alliance not by the African National Congress. In order to keep the power, the ANC deliberately isolates the Western Cape so as to weaken its adversary party (Saunderson-Meyer 2018). This reduces the potential for political cooperation between the local and the national levels, which in turn makes it harder to develop pre-emptive and proactive answers to key issues like this one.
Furthermore, although climate hazards are not always predictable, it appears clearly that this one was, and had been predicted long ago, but that a lack of political will and institutional effectiveness impeded its resolution.
Conclusion: the central role of sound policies in the management of water resources
Eventually, day zero was not reached. But this was only made possible by the quick implementation of a set of drastic measures strictly restricting the use of water to 50L/person/day (Mahr, 2018). This short-term, emergency policy didn't erase the risk of water scarcity, which means day zero could still happen later if no long-term-oriented measures are taken. In other words, because of institutional inefficiency and political pettiness, the costs of climate change and growing demand for water had to be borne by citizens. This is certainly not acceptable for the future, as it undermines both people's rights to be protected, and the state's legitimacy which is mainly based on guaranteeing the security of its citizens. Therefore in future, drawing from the nearly-catastrophic experience of Cape Town, the focus should be put on improving the ecological and political sustainability of water resources management.
Sarah Champagne
References:
Mahr (2018): "How Cape Town was saved from running out of water" in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/04/back-from-the-brink-how-cape-town-cracked-its-water-crisis
Olivier (2017): "Cape Town's Water Crisis: Driven by politics more than drought" in The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/cape-towns-water-crisis-driven-by-politics-more-than-drought-88191
Saunderson-Meyer (2018): "Commentary: In-drought hits South Africa, the politics of water", in Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saundersonmeyer-drought-commentary/commentary-in-drought-hit-south-africa-the-politics-of-water-idUSKBN1FP226
South African Water Caucus (2017): Report on the state of the department of water and sanitation, http://emg.org.za/images/downloads/water_cl_ch/SAWC_State-of-DWS-Report.pdf
Ziervogel, Shale, Du (2011): Climate Change adaptation in a developing country context: the case of urban water supply in Cape Town, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3763/cdev.2010.0036
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