Cape Town’s water crisis presents an opportunity, and a potential lesson for other arid areas around the world. As the United Nations’ 26th World Water Day approaches on Friday, the South African city’s taps are now unlikely to run dry this year. But the root causes of the problem persist. Creating water markets can bypass some of these, and help limit the social and economic pain that scarcity causes.
South Africa has been addressing these trends. Pretoria passed laws to help prepare for water scarcity just before the millennium. It also proposed detailed recommendations for Cape Town a decade ago. Short-term decisions aren’t the only problem, though. Poor governance plays a large role. The best way to manage the resource is at the watershed level, ignoring political boundaries. South Africa does the opposite. Pretoria determines how water is allocated. It decided in 2016 to keep giving 40 percent of the Western Cape’s water to agriculture, and was slow to declare a drought emergency and release financial aid.
Restoring the native shrubbery would take a year or two, but would be far quicker and cheaper than building major dams, water reuse facilities and desalination plants.Left unchecked, poor water governance will hinder investment and growth. Emergency measures forcing farmers to cut water use cost over 30,000 jobs last year. Foreign trade accounts for around a third of the Western Cape’s gross regional product, with water-intensive goods like food and wine contributing more than half of that.
Tech has already helped farmers in the Western Cape cut water use by 10 percent in recent years, and could increase those savings to 40 percent – separate from any government-imposed restrictions. That could boost supply for residents and businesses by up to a fifth. If farmers could use recycled water for 70 percent of their needs, as happens in Israel, they’d save even more. Manufacturing and other industries can make similar calculations.
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