Cape Town is a reminder that we all need to tackle urban water

Like many, I was relieved to hear Cape Town shifted Day Zero (when water is supplied to particular areas and at collection points) to 2019. This reprieve gives Cape Town some breathing room in the short term, but let’s not be complacent. New ways of thinking about water security and management are required.

Cape Town’s experience represents a new reality for urban centres. It’s one that’s likely to become all too familiar for other urban centres in coming years, thanks to the wicked combination of a changing climate, rapid population growth and urbanisation, and economic constraints that are limiting our ability to pay for investment.

The historical data and assumptions that we use to plan our water services are no longer enough. A changing climate means the statistical methods traditionally used to analyse economic risk and estimate the likelihood and magnitudes of future extreme events (floods and droughts) do not adequately inform strategic decision making. Many urban centres—like Cape Town—are experiencing unprecedented drought, and like many cities, this drought could be broken by unprecedented floods. The plans developed by governments and water businesses do not adequately address the critical need for resilience. Unfortunately, it’s too late to start thinking about responses once the crisis has hit. The options are limited once you get into crisis mode.

So, governments and water businesses need to start thinking now about how to manage water in this new, less predictable world. Fortunately, there IS much we can do. The millennium drought was a real wake-up call for Australian cities such as Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne, which experienced much lower than expected rainfall, with flooding rains breaking the drought in Melbourne and Brisbane. We learned valuable lessons about how to recover from a prolonged drought and the floods that followed, and how to build resilience into our urban water systems for future climatic extremes.

In many Australian cities, governments and water businesses responded by developing new infrastructure (such as desalination plants) in the midst of the drought. But, they also considered other options to diversify water sources—sources that are decentralised, fit-for-purpose, more cost effective and sustainable. In essence, this approach involves looking at cities as catchments and considering options such as reusing wastewater and harvesting stormwater. These options often take longer to incubate and implement, so the infrastructure first deployed provided the ‘safety net’ for these other options to mature. This approach also led to combining a clever mix of natural and human made assets—that is, ecosystem services that can improve water quality, provide safe passage and detention of floodwater, enhance landscape connectivity, create biodiversity and influence the urban microclimate.

Australian cities are also investing in strengthening social resilience to complement investment in infrastructure. Social resilience includes building social capital in the community and institutional (governance) arena for integrated water management across the basin, city, municipality and community dimensions. Most importantly, responding to a change on this scale must be a partnership across governments, the water industry and the community. Every city will have a different solution, but fundamental to social resilience are community water literacy, capacity for industry to innovate and the ability of governments to develop enabling policies. The community’s role in managing water resources is critical, both for changing household behaviours and identifying and co-designing preferences for managing water.

I’ll be sharing our vision for resilient, liveable, productive and sustainable cities and towns, and how we can apply water sensitive principles and practices at the Water Institute of Southern Africa’s ‘Breaking Boundaries Connecting Ideas’ conference in June 2018.