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Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 22 April 2011 South African cities need to prepare for rapidly increasing oil prices, unpredictable rainfall patterns and fresh water demand, according to a State of the Cities Report released on Wednesday. Cape Town needs to [...] Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 19 March 2011 Healthy eco-systems matter and South Africans are not paying enough for the water they get, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).  Agriculture uses at least 80% of our water in the Western Cape “We haven’t yet shifted the public perception about how important water is and we’re running out of sites to build dams – there’re no other rivers with excess water,” WWF living lands unit head Mark Botha told News24. He said that South Africans were not paying for the water they used and that the demand for water would exceed supply, despite plans to build dams. “Municipalities need the income that water generates and so we’ve built ourselves into this dependency on water. If urban water demand keeps increasing, you’ll never get to water security unless you flatten the demand curve.” As SA prepares for Water Day on March 22, authorities accept that something needs to be done about urban water consumption, and acknowledge that there are “legacy issues” to compound the water problems. “We have various legacy issues: There has been inadequate maintenance and we’ve reached the point where there’s no lead time. We’ve consumed 52% of our water infrastructure – that’s a challenge,” said City of Cape Town director of water and sanitation services Lungile Dlamini. Botha conceded that the city was improving water management, but urged that high water consumers be obligated to pay more for their consumption. Continue reading South Africans are not paying enough water Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 08 March 2011 Massive water theft by farmers from the Vaal River, and the inability of municipalities to maintain infrastructure, are two of the main causes that will push South Africa into a water crisis in less than a decade.  By 2013, water demand on the Vaal River system will outstrip the available yield A paper by the South African Institute of Civil Engineering water division chairman, Dr Chris Herold, alleges that farmers steal about 175-million cubic metres of water from the Vaal, contributing to a significant reduction in the river’s yield. “The water demands on the Vaal River have long exceeded the assured yield of the catchment. It has been publicly stated that by 2013, the water demand on the Vaal River system will outstrip the available yield,” Herold said. “What is not commonly known is that this is based on achieving a 15% saving in water demand. To date no noticeable saving has been realised.” This implies that we are already living with a 2% supply deficit in the Vaal system, and by 2013 we will face a 6% supply deficit, which would rise continually until 2019, when it would reach a staggering 11%, said the paper. Continue reading Water theft contributes to SA’s increasing crisis Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 28 February 2011 Demand for water in agriculture and energy production could spike in the coming decades while catastrophic floods and droughts strike more often, a water conference in Canada is to hear this week.  A pair of denim jeans requires up to 6 tons of virtual water “At unpredictable times, too much water will arrive in some places and too little in others,” said Zafar Adeel, chair of UN Water which coordinates water-related efforts of 28 United Nations organizations and agencies. Within a generation, water demand in many countries is forecast to exceed supply by an estimated 40 percent. In other parts of the world prone to flooding, catastrophic floods normally expected once a century could occur every 20 years instead. Meanwhile, spending on technologies and services to discover, manage, filter, disinfect and desalinate water, improve infrastructure and distribution, mitigate flood damage and reduce water consumption by households, industry and agriculture is expected to rise to a trillion dollars annually by 2020. Some 300 scientists, policy-makers and economists will release these and other research findings as well as proven new tools, ideas and best practices for optimizing water management at a Canadian Water Network international conference in Ottawa. The event kicks off on February 28 and runs through March 3. Continue reading Scientists to highlight water insecurity Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 16 February 2011 If SA was able to recycle its total national water resource 1,7 times over by 2035, the country’s unemployment problem would be solved, International Water Resources Association vice-president Anthony Turton said yesterday.  We will create jobs and lose them again if we don’t recycle our water. Photo: Reuters SA’s government is battling a 24% unemployment rate (4,1-million people), as measured by Statistics SA in the last quarter of last year, and has promised, in its New Growth Path economic plan, to create 5- million jobs by 2020. While the ability to recycle water would not of itself create jobs, without this ability the necessary preconditions for the kind of economic growth that would create jobs would not be in place, Dr Turton told Business Day after his presentation to the inaugural Water and Energy Forum which ended in Sandton yesterday. “We can incentivise and do whatever we like, but we will create jobs and lose them again if we don’t recycle our water…. In order to sustain growth we need 62-billion cubic metres of water and we have 3 8- billion cubic metres now,” he said. However, for the first time in history SA’s economic and infrastructure development was constrained by environmental considerations, Dr Turton said in his presentation. SA’s water resources were increasingly compromised by growing demand and looming pollution problems from decades of mining that did not take the environment into consideration. Continue reading Recycled water will create employment |
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