News – South Africa: SA’s ticking water bomb

Original Post Date: 2008-12-14 Time: 06:00:06  Posted By: Jan

By Eleanor Momberg

South Africa’s water crisis was “like a ticking time bomb” waiting to explode. “All the signs are there,” said Deon Nel, the manager of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Sanlam Living Waters Partnership.

Nel’s confirmation of the looming water crisis comes on the heels of the warning by Dr Anthony Turton, the former natural resource and environment unit fellow at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), that the water crisis and the lack of surplus water in South Africa would hamper future economic development.

Turton also stated in a paper – which he was prevented from delivering at a CSIR conference last month – that violence similar to that experienced during the xenophobic attacks in May could be unleashed “in response to perceptions of deteriorating public health” as a result of declining water quality.

The link between health and the quality of water supplied to the populace became clear in recent weeks with the outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe because of the collapse of water purification systems and increased pollution in rivers and wells.

The United Nations Environment Programme’s fourth Global Environment Outlook, published last year, stated that more than 2 million people in the developing world died needlessly each year from waterborne diseases, and most of them were children younger than five.

Irrigation for agriculture used about 70 percent of available water. The report added that, by 2025, water use would have risen by 50 percent in developing countries and by 18 percent in the developed world.

“The escalating burden of water demand will become intolerable in water-scarce countries,” the report said.

One such country is South Africa, where many water sources are being over-exploited – a fact emphasised in the South Africa Environment Outlook. This report found that almost all exploitable water sources had been tapped. It recommended that treated sewage or mine water be re-used by industry; that there be an urgent expansion of existing water conservation and water demand management initiatives; and that land and water policies and management be integrated.

The report also recommended protection against water quality deterioration as a result of a change in land use or management practices.

Turton’s paper highlighted the three strategic water quality challenges that decision-makers needed to know about, and how the CSIR should respond.

His suspension and subsequent departure from the CSIR highlighted the need for urgent action to prevent a full-scale water crisis – a warning issued by the Rand Water Board Trust earlier this year.

Turton stated that the social and economic wellbeing of South Africa had three fundamental developmental drivers. These were dilution capacity, spatial development patterns and historic legacy. “If we fail to recognise them, all of our efforts will amount to naught,” he wrote.

Because of the low rainfall in Southern Africa, water scarcity was a fundamental developmental constraint. “It is not only the availability of water that is a constraint, but also the allocation of it.”

In this regard, South Africa has allocated about 98 percent of the national water resource at a high assurance of supply, he said. “South Africa simply has no more surplus water and all future economic development (and, thus, social wellbeing) will be constrained by this,” he wrote.

Turton said an important implication was that South Africa had lost its dilution capacity, so all pollutants and effluent streams would increasingly need to be treated to ever higher standards before being discharged into communal waters.

The choices were either to change the current developmental trajectory and accept that the targets specified in the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgisa) were simply unobtainable, or to have a radical rethink about how to mobilise the science, engineering and technology (SET) capacity of the South African nation.

“If we accept the former option then we can say, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that social instability will grow and South Africa will slowly slide into anarchy and chaos,” he warned.

The only option was a radical rethink of how the national SET capacity should be mobilised as a matter of priority.

The spatial development pattern in Southern Africa was such that all major centres of economic development were on watershed divides, meaning that it had taken major engineering and technology to mobilise the water needed to sustain these industrial and urban conurbations. It now meant that effluent return flow out of these major industrial and urban conurbations was a major threat to future economic development, simply because the quality of the water was becoming unfit for human and industrial consumption.

“This is driving growing concerns from the public that will need to be addressed if social stability is to be maintained, if investor confidence is to be restored and if the legitimacy of the government is to remain intact,” he said.

The shortage of engineers and other skilled professionals, at municipal level in particular, was exacerbating the crisis. Turton said that, because South Africa had lost its dilution capacity, the country was facing an increasing water quality problem. But, this would be dealt with by the National Water Quality Science, Technology and Policy Support Programme, which is under development.

The challenges faced by the government and the private sector were: