Water Shortages in South Africa

South Africa is currently experiencing a wave of infrastructure failures, reflecting most noticeably as the loadshedding for electricity, and disruptions to water supply and sanitation. This begs the question as to what the root cause might be.

In the case of water, that answer is best found in the National Water Resource Strategy (NWRS) first published around 2002. This is an official document, mandated by the National Water Act, designed to present the most accurate audit of water resource availability countrywide. The intention was to enable the NWRS to give decision-makers an accurate assessment of the present and future trends on the supply side of the equation. This was supposed to be mediated by Catchment Management Agencies (CMAs), also mandated by the National Water Act (NWA), as they engage in the complex political deliberations presented in the Independent Development Plans (IDPs), mandated by the Municipal Systems Act. We can think of the IDPs as the demand side of the equation. It is logical to assume that normal human behaviour would dictate that the IDP is an aspirational document, typically representing planned demand that does not yet exist. This aspiration must be married up with the reality of actual water availability, which is why the NWRS is so important.

There have been three NWRS documents published, but only the first is accurate enough to be regarded for planning purposes. NWRS 1 was produced when South Africa still had robust science, engineering, and technology capability, which meant that the numbers generated for each of the 19 Water Management Areas (WMAs) are the most reliable. NWRS 2 and 3 merely rehashed the data from NWRS 1, in part because the technical capacity to upgrade the original data has simply been lost.

NWRS 1 can be summarised in this image, which shows the future situation in 2025, as projected off the baseline data used for that study.

The total national water deficit was projected to be 2,044 million cubic metres (MCM) per annum. However, the devil is always in the detail, so the Upper Vaal and the Mvoti to Umzimkulu WMAs were both projected to be in deficit of just below 800 MCM, with the Berg in deficit of over 500 MCM. The only WMA that was projected to be in surplus by 2025, is the Crocodile West and Marico, with 335 MCM derived from sewage return flows out of Gauteng. 

Stated differently, in 2002 South Africa became a fundamentally water-constrained economy, with the NWRS 1 showing that we had already allocated 98% of all the water we had, with some WMAs being over-allocated by as much as 120%. This answers part of the question posed above. South Africa has simply reached the limit of its development potential, assuming that water resources are managed the way they have been for the last 120 years.

The problem is nuanced, however, so let us delve into this a little deeper. The initial number ascribed to the national water resource was over 53 billion cubic metres (BCM) per annum. That number represents all the flow in all the rivers. It was this number that gave us the 98% allocation noted above. That number has subsequently been revised downwards, in part because of changes in rainfall patterns, but also in part because the instrumentation used to measure streamflow has been damaged or destroyed

This process of revision has shown that we now have a similar capacity to gauge rainfall and measure streamflow in rivers, as we had in the 1920s. There was a dramatic loss of gauging capacity in 1994, when 25% of all systems were lost, never to be recovered. This means that we are flying blind, with decision-making around things like flood management, increasingly impacted by the loss of data management capabilities.

To close the knowledge gaps, the Water Research Commission (WRC) commissioned a high- confidence study conducted by the University of Cape Town. The results were published around 2018, showing the loss of data capture and management capacity shown above, but also revealing a new phenomenon unknown until that report.  When subjecting all known rainfall to a sophisticated set of statistical analytics, two new patterns were detected.

 The first was about changes to the actual volume of rain, with a clear watershed in 1982. Before 1982, South Africa was wetter, and after that date, it became drier. This seems counter intuitive given that many of our dams are currently full, but this is what the empirical data shows us. More alarmingly, there is a shift in the seasonal distribution of rainfall, with winter-rainfall areas most notably affected. We can interpret this data, considering the recent flooding, by saying that the data shown in this graphic does not indicate the intensity of the storm events, only the distribution. Stated differently, disturbances to our climate are resulting in heavier than normal rainfall in single events, punctuated by longer periods of dry conditions.

Finally, we need to fill in one more critical piece of missing information if we are to answer this question properly. Work done by the CSIR, shortly after NWRS 1 was published, did future projections of water demand. This resulted in a single graphic that illustrated our national water dilemma in the most powerful way. The two horizontal dashed lines represent NWRS 1 data.

The lower line is 38 BCM, representing all the water in existing dams. The upper line represents every drop of water in the country, including that which would need to be recovered from waste using existing technology. The two curves show projected demand in two scenarios. The high- water-use scenario assumed no improvement to efficiency, in which case we would need 63 BCM by 2018. The second curve assumes major improvement in water use efficiency, in which case we would hit the wall in 2035. This single graphic is the most accurate depiction of the data shown in NWRS 1 and gives a chilling message that has not been absorbed by our decision-making elites. 

In conclusion, from an estate management perspective, we can safely say that all current and future development will be fundamentally constrained by our environmental conditions.  We can also safely assume that under current management by government officials, no solution is likely to be forthcoming, until such time as they begin to understand the implications of the data shown in these four graphics. Successful estate managers will internalise this data because it means in effect that managing agents, bodies corporate and homeowners associations will increasingly have to deal with these realities themselves.  The reason for this is simple – only two functional CMAs exist in the country, so the demand shown in the IDPs cannot be met by the supply reflected in the NWRS, as intended. The CMA process has been a resounding failure, and this has destroyed water security in the country for the foreseeable future. When the ship goes down, each lifeboat is left to fend for itself. This is the core message in the data above, for each of you are in a lifeboat of your own.