Improving water management in underserved areas benefits the entire country.
There’s nothing like a crisis to call attention away from a crisis. With the urgent concerns about the COVlD-19 pandemic dominating the public conversation, it’s tempting to think that the water crisis has simply evaporated. It hasn’t. Cape Town’s dams may be filling up again, but the Eastern Cape experienced record-level water shortages during the winter; and the rest of SA - and the world - remains parched of clean, potable H20.
’We live in a digital and connected world, where we can fashion medicine through genetics and send rockets into orbit like clockwork, yet over 2 billion people still lack access to basic sanitation, and at least a quarter of those practise open defecation,’ says Chetan Mistry, strategy and marketing manager for Xylem Africa. The problem, he adds, is very acutely a rural one, since most people without basic sanitation live outside SA's urban areas.
‘lt‘s easy to forget about these people, yet addressing their essential water and sanitation needs will boost all of the nation,’ says Mistry. ’South Africa is a water-scarce country. There is a virtuous circle between good water access, wastewater management, and how much a community will care about those resources. If we help rural communities access water safely, we will ultimately reduce the burden on local water supplies.'
Mistry points to Yale's Environmental Performance Index, which ranks SA at 133 out ot180 countries for water and sanitation.
’This gap indicates a lot of potential we can exploit to make our country more inclusive and equal,’ he says.
The countries ranked below SA on the sanitation and drinking water metric include a familiar roll call of geographies vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Alongside the vast developing nations of India (139) and Nigeria (177) is the desert country of Namibia (138), as well as the Solomon Islands (153) and Kiribati (149), both of which are disappearing under rising sea levels.
At both a macro and a micro level, water management is linked to rural development and climate change. And poor water management can have a significant impact on bottom lines throughout the economy.
‘Climate change water-related risks to business can be direct, such as the non-availability of water supply to manage operations like waste disposal, which can disrupt actual operations. They can also be indirect, where supply chains are disrupted due to water supply issues or poor water quality. This highlights the value of taking a water-stewardship approach, to consider impacts not only on a mine site, for instance, but in the wider catchment in which a mine operates, according to Simon Lorentz, principal hydrologist at SRK Consulting.
Lorentz says that catchment-specific risks are influenced by local water-resource management; governance effectiveness in dealing with factors such as increasing demand and unpredictability driven by climate variability; the adequacy of local infrastructure; the amount of pollution being disposed into water bodies, and the resulting quality of available water.
