Home PodcastInayet Wadee Water crisis solutions won’t be easy to implement

Water crisis solutions won’t be easy to implement

by Salaamedia Intern
The land is losing water faster as climate change gets worse Photo Pexels

South Africa – Water scarcity is slowly becoming a reality in South Africa. As climate change becomes worse, we are already seeing parts of the country going without water for hours and sometimes days at a time. 

Just like loadshedding, the water crisis shouldn’t come as a surprise to South Africans. There are different reasons for why we are facing a water crisis. One of the main reasons, according to Petrus Venter, Deputy Regional Director: Water Resources Management, is the prolonged loadshedding we’ve been having.

“All our water systems are driven by electricity, and it was only a matter of time before we started running out of capacity. We had such severe and prolonged loadshedding in the last few months. It is unfortunate that we are now getting to the critical stages, that reservoirs have run dry and there is just not enough time in between to get the reservoirs full. Also, the water needs to be purified. Plants are running with electricity so there is no purification that can take place [when there is loadshedding].”

Lack of maintenance is another issue of the water crisis

In an attempt to bring water to the rural communities, other parts of water infrastructure have been neglected, said Venter. This neglect of infrastructure has further led to the water crisis the country is currently in.

“The department’s focus over the last at least 20 to 25 years was to get the backlog of our water services and access to water for the previous disadvantage. I get the feeling that it was in some cases even a purposeful neglect of certain infrastructure for the purpose of giving water and access to water to the various rural communities. We have to just acknowledge this. It is not a cheap exercise to have done but it has caught up on us.”

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Having poor infrastructure does little to help the problem

Having a scarcity of water is a huge problem and it is only compounded by the fact the water infrastructure is sorely lacking. Even if there is water or even a small amount, the lack of proper infrastructure means it will go to waste, explained Venter.

“If you do not maintain infrastructure, like local municipalities, then you sit with a much bigger problem. Even the little bit of water that you do have in your system, you cannot even account for it. There is so many leakages and non-accountable water. The average non-revenue water means municipalities that receive a certain amount of water either from their own systems or getting it from water boards as a service provider, they cannot account for about 50%. We are sitting with a rough average of 50% nationwide of water that is in the system that cannot be even accountable.”

This includes water that is lost through illegal connections and leakages. It also includes the amount of water that is lost from the municipality’s failure to act fast enough to sort out burst pipes. This water is all paid for by the municipality but it does not reach households which is another problem in itself.

 

The water laws of South Africa 

One thing that cannot be criticised. The water laws that exist in South Africa are one of the best in the world, said Dr Anthony Turton, trained scientist specialising in water resource management. The only problem that exists is the implementation of said laws and policies.

“I can say without a fear of contradiction that the policies we have in South Africa in general and certainly embedded in the National Water Act are world-class policies. When the National Water Act came up 1998 it was widely lauded throughout the world as being extremely progressive and in fact cutting edge. This whole notion of integrated Water Resource Management was very much in vogue in the 90s. It’s not so much in vogue at the moment because of the complexity arising from the implementation of an integrated system. Yes, in general our laws are very far-reaching, however the implementation is not.”

 

Towns going without water for countless days 

The water crisis is getting worse and worse as the days go by. We are now starting to hear of places in Johannesburg where water is shut off for hours at a time. Hospitals are left running without any water. The situation is reaching a critical point and Turton fears it will only get worse.

“I live on the South Coast and we’ve got parts of the South Coast that have not had water for months on end … It just happens to be coming now into the urban centres. It came to Cape Town in 2018, in Port Elizabeth area and it’s in Durban. It’s moving up into Gauteng now. So, all of this is something that we’ve learned about for a long period of time and the simple reality is that South Africa, as with the rest of the world, are running into limitations on the availability of freshwater water supplies globally.”

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Solving the problem through desalination 

Fortunately, there seems to be a solution for the water crisis. Turner explained the earth has enough water to sustain human life. The problem is there is too much salt in the water. Through the process of desalination, this salt can be removed but it is still an expensive process.

“We don’t actually have a water problem. We really have a salt problem. We’ve got too much salt, it’s not that we haven’t got enough water. We simply have too much salt in the water. We see huge amounts of progress being made in fact. The Saudi Arabian government is driving the cost of desalination down to $00,30 cents per cubic metre and then the vision is to take it down to $00,20 cents per kilolitre. This is now on par with what it costs us to treat our surface water and very soon it’s going to be cheaper than what it costs us to take our polluted water out of a river.”

 

Moving to cleaner energy will help reduce water usage

South Africa relies heavily on coal power plants to produce energy. Not only is it damaging the environment, but it also uses a huge amount of water to keep it running. Shifting to cleaner energy will help to bring these plants offline but that is easier said than done, explained Turner.

“We burn one kilogram of coal and about half a kilogram of water per kilowatt hour of electricity. For electricity we need both water and coal. That’s the first thing we need to understand. The second thing we need to understand now is that a decision was made many years ago in the 1950s that because our coal is the foundation of the economy and is found in parts of Northern KZN, you’ve got to move the water to where the coal is rather than move the coal to where the water is. So, the systems have been engineered over decades to pump vast quantities of water uphill to the power stations. You can’t easily change that flow around. Those are two very important things.”

The next major thing to keep in mind is renewable energy only produces electricity at a certain time. Wind turbines generate electricity when the wind is blowing, solar panels only generate electricity when the sun is out. The problem is finding a cheap way to store the extra electricity and use it when demand is much higher. There are batteries available but those are too costly at the moment.

 

Evaporation is the killer of all rivers

The removal of vegetation and swamplands has caused the rate of evaporation to increase. Less water is being stored in the ground which means less water is flowing down to the rivers. According to Venter water is evaporating at a very fast rate.

“Our modern civilization creates modern deserts which results in more flooding and runoff and less groundwater recharge. So, there is a declining groundwater resource that we need to consider. We all know now that we are in a heat wave, but you know the amount of evaporation that happened at this moment is very close to two millimetres of evaporation per day. Just to give you a very quick comparison it can rain in Johannesburg 600 to 680 millimetres of rain, but it evaporates per year about 1.3 metres. More than double the amount of evaporation happening. So, there is a deficit of water.”

Turton went on to explain just how bad the rate of evaporation has got. 

“Of 100 units of rain that fall over the whole area of South Africa, eight units of that end up in the river and one unit ends up going into groundwater. The rest of that ends up as evaporation. That means that 91 units of rain gets lost to evaporation immediately. I’ll reinforce that by saying that the Vaal Dam, which is the biggest single source of supply for Gauteng, more water is lost from the Vaal Dam for 11 months of the year then flows in under natural conditions. If there wasn’t water from the Tugela and others, it would get smaller. Even if you didn’t use the water, evaporation would simply make it smaller and smaller and smaller.”

Currently the best option seems to be waiting for Saudi Arabia to make progress on the desalination programme. South Africa has missed its deadlines on all 20 large projects they had been working on. Seven are still in the planning phase and the rest are at various stages in construction. It seems that residents are once again left without any choices but to bear the water cuts with patience.

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