While the rest of SA watches aghast as Durban succumbs to a succession of extreme floods, I find myself observing the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality’s steady descent towards day zero with an eerie sense of déjà vu.
Reports that the city of Gqeberha has less than 30 days before its taps run dry are a stark reminder of my own time wrestling with an impending day zero in the Western Cape government in what became one of the best-known global water crises in recent years.
Due to persistent problems occurring with the Nooitgedacht Water Scheme and minimal water-use reduction from residents, it appears that SA’s sixth-largest city needs a miracle to avoid its own day zero and a catastrophe of epic proportions. As Churchill once said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, a warning that we would do well to heed.
With a national average of 37% of piped water lost through leaks, much can be said about the government’s handling of this crisis, and the appalling state of municipal water reticulation infrastructure countrywide. But there are certain inescapable natural facts that South Africans must begin to face.
Our country relies on 22 strategic water source areas in five provinces to provide water for 60% of the population, support 67% of national economic activity, and supply 70% of irrigation water. Unfortunately, 98% of SA’s available reliable water has already been allocated, and projections now are that there will be a 17% deficit by 2030.
This heavy reliance on strategic water source areas is a key feature of Nelson Mandela Bay’s predicament. It derives two-thirds of its water, as well as all the irrigation water required for farming in the Gamtoos Valley, from three dams fed by the catchments of the Kromme, Kouga and Baviaanskloof rivers. These dams have been a whisker away from empty for more than a year, due partly to the long-standing drought, but also thanks to more than half of the catchment area being degraded by alien tree invasion, overgrazing and wetland destruction.
The negative effects of land degradation on water supply for Nelson Mandela Bay have been well known for more than a decade. A study co-ordinated by the SA National Biodiversity Institute in 2010 showed how a combination of alien removal and indigenous revegetation on overgrazed land in the catchments areas would result in an increased water yield of about 11-million cubic metres annually, amounting to 16% of the metro’s annual water draw from these dams.
Soil degradation
This echoes my own experience in the Western Cape, where the provincial government rapidly identified catchment management and farm level effects such as soil conservation and improved irrigation practices as primary programmatic support areas. Even now, with Cape Town’s day zero seemingly the stuff of yesteryear, the department of agriculture continues to dedicate funds to ecological restoration and climate resilient agriculture. This is for good reason.
It was reported in a 2021 study for the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation that “harmful soil degradation processes are part of many environmental problems caused by conventional tillage and unsustainable agricultural practices. These practices are continuing unabated under many crop-livestock agricultural systems in SA and pose a major threat to the sustainability of agriculture, food production and national security.”
With agriculture consuming 60% of SA’s total water supply, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn from the same report that the drought-beating Western Cape has a 51% adoption rate of climate-resilient, conservation agriculture practices, while the Eastern Cape languishes with a paltry 2%.
Yes, water treatment, consumption efficiency, improved reticulation and desalination are all solutions to our increasingly irregular rainfall regimes. But given that only 8% of our land provides us with 50% of our surface run-off, isn’t it time that we made protecting the ecological systems that protect these regions a matter of national security?
• Maguire is carbon project manager at Climate Neutral Group SA. He writes in his personal capacity.
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