Interviewees in order of appearance:

Dr Kevin Winter
Senior lecturer: Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Councillor Xanthea Limberg
Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services and Energy, City of Cape Town

Prof Mark New
Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate Change: University of Cape Town

Dr Rolfe Eberhard
Independent public policy advisor

Dr Piotr Wolski
Research associate: Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• Lack of data, information and communication from authorities erodes trust; clear, accessible, timely, frequently updated data and information build trust
• During the early phase of the Cape Town crisis and as late as end 2017 there was insufficient information, lots of misinformation, a dumbing down of technical information, and a lot of noise around how the information came across to the public
• As a result, among both households and businesses there was distrust both of the information the authorities did provide, and of the latter’s ability to steer the city out of the crisis
• Because people were not fully informed of how dire the situation was, their behaviour was not sufficiently adapted to the reality
• As a result of the lack of data, societal friction and tension between various groupings blaming each other for the crisis was also worse than it could have been had data been accessible
• The situation changed dramatically at the beginning of 2018 when the city government made the strategic decision to significantly improve access to information, with regularly updated communication tools and channels such as the Water Outlook report and the Water Dashboard.
• The city government also developed innovative tools for communicating critical data
• It did become easier for the authorities to communicate as it became clearer they were going to be able to steer the city out of the crisis
• This belated transparency from government lifted the uncertainty from the system
• The cost of the Day Zero campaign, which was substantial – to tourism, to business, to agriculture – could have been much lower had the transparency and access to information been implemented much earlier
• The city government has received recognition internationally for the way it made information available to the public in the later stages of the crisis

00:00:05
Hooks:

• Important to use salient information to communicate clearly and engender trust (MV)
• Communication builds trust; more information and knowledge helps (KW)
• City government did not share as much as it should have, initially (PR)

Initially:

lack of trust because insufficient data, information, communication

Later:

rectified, trust rebuilt, people empowered to change behaviour

00:00:57
TO END 2017: COMMUNICATION FAILURE, LACK OF TRUST

• The power of data and transparent, credible information to change behaviour (CP)
• Initially, for both businesses and households, trust in information coming from city government and in its ability to handle the crisis was lacking, because flow of data and information from city government was insufficient (CP, KW)
• Initially, flow of technical information to public from technical officials unsatisfactory because dumbed down and came via politicians (KW)
• Citizens initially in a blissfully unaware state as to the severity of the crisis; joining the dots and pointing out implications of data points was necessary but was not forthcoming initially (MV)
• Societal friction could have been avoided had data been available earlier (PW)

FROM BEGINNING 2018: COMMUNICATION RECTIFIED

• City government made strategic decision to change access to information (MV)
• Specific communication tools implemented: Water Outlook report, Water Dashboard, City of Cape Town’s website (CP, KW)
• It became easier for authorities to communicate as it became clearer they were going to be able to steer out of crisis (KW)
• Drought has changed data situation: now lots of data available (PW)

00:15:34
Close:

City government has now received international acclaim for putting out information in the way it did (MV)

00:00:57
"One of the key lessons that we’ve got out of the drought is the power of data, and the kind of ability for transparent, credible information to really change behaviour”; from around May / June 2017 there was a lot of misinformation, clouded information, and changes in information emanating from the city government (CP)

00:01:36
"And there was a lot of noise around how that information came across to the public, particularly initially, going back to August of 2017, there was minimal amount of information that the City was sharing, minimal amount of technical information”; lot of information came via media and social media; great deal of uncertainty; "left citizens feeling like we were going headlong into this crisis …; very little trust in the technical ability of the city to be able to steer our way out of this”; political voice dominant, and transfer of technical information via politicians dumbed down; we had disparity between what was truth and what wasn’t the truth (KW)

00:02:45
Bits of information fed through by city government but it was very murky, "the actual severity of it I think wasn’t really clearly understood or articulated” (CP)

00:03:01
"The City had dam levels up and how far we were from exhausting the dam levels, but I think in a lot of people’s minds that wasn’t clearly linked to what did that mean you know for how long before we will run out of water, how much water do we have left per household”; joining the dots necessary for people to understand imminence of crisis and importance of immediate change in behaviour; "the urgency of the situation was perhaps left or made public too late …; the general public was in sort of a blissfully unaware state to a large extent” (MV)

00:03:58
Experience of GreenCape trying to relay information from city government to business sector; "there was a lot of questioning as to really the credibility of that information, and the credibility of the City overall to respond to the crisis; I think there was a real undermining of trust, because there were these big plans being proposed but no details behind them, no real kind of forthcoming project plans etcetera, and real questions around the timelines of it, as well as kind of what the real situation really was”; changed dramatically at beginning of 2018; Water Outlook document released for the first time; released by City of Cape Town’s water department; quite a technical document; lot of detail; very informative; "and I think that in terms of that information flow to businesses, it had a huge impact, because suddenly there was a sense that actually the City had a much better handle on what was going on than people thought previously” (CP)

00:05:52
Similar situation for residential users; models within city government that could predict when Day Zero was possibly going to happen were not available to people outside government; outsiders trying to model independently; then beginning of 2018 city government came out with weekly Water Dashboard that provided information; "so suddenly … this uncertainty was lifted from the system …; the credibility and trust in the City to manage the crisis was really heightened when people actually had information at their fingertips of what they were doing” (CP)

00:07:42
City became increasingly free in making available information on its website; this became a key reference point for many people; 2 o’clock every Monday the levels of the dams were updated on the website; model that was being used to manage water and steer out of the crisis put up on site; it became easier to share information as time went on because city government became increasingly confident as time went on that it could steer out of the crisis; "building trust and confidence among the public because they ultimately were the most important means by which this water use and demand was going to be controlled, and building up that trust earlier on would have been much more helpful”; eventually scaremongering was needed to change consumer behaviour; "but if I had seen and heard perhaps a more nuanced and more managed and more level-headed approach to the way it was being managed I think the public would have been much more confident that it could be avoided completely”; scaring people did change behaviour dramatically, but "I’m not sure that’s the wisest approach to take from a public response perspective” (KW)

00:10:27
When the crisis started city’s communication department was doing things as they had done them before; "perhaps in retrospect didn’t fully appreciate how much information people and particularly journalists wanted”; water could be very technical; "we didn’t share as much as, in retrospect, perhaps we should have, initially, and there was some criticism about that”; later than should have, set up meeting between key officials and journalists, for officials to share technical information with journalists; "so when I look back on it and if I had to tell this story to someone else who needed advice on how to deal with a similar situation I would say that in this instance more information is better than less; give them a lot and let them choose it, but always get them around a table to explain what can be very technical”; this resulted in better understanding of the complexities city government was dealing with; "so my one sort of, if I could do it all over I would have had those engagements more frequently and sooner than I did” (PR)

00:13:51
"When the City made a strategic decision to change access to information and how much that impacted on people’s behaviour, my strong belief is that all of that should have happened much much earlier, that kind of transparency, not treating the citizens on a need to know basis, but actually giving the tools to the citizens in order to enable them to make the right or responsible decisions”; a lot of the cost of the Day Zero communication – to tourism, business, agriculture – could have been lower if this information flow had been phased in at an earlier stage; "there’s really a big message here that there were too little information, there was not enough transparency, not enough trust, and by making this information accessible to people you empowered the citizens and they really started to behave” (MV)

00:14:48
A lot of the substantial societal friction during the drought could have been avoided "if we had access to transparent, clearly presented, timely information, data, on rainfall, on state of the dams, on how much water flows where and how and what …; that access to that information, that access to the data is a very important thing, a very important aspect of building trust between players, between you know parties involved in that whole process, being parts of society, individual people, civic organisations, government, you name it”; that wasn’t happening before the drought; the drought has changed that; "the City’s now sharing the Water Dashboard, it’s a very good step forward, we have timely information, we have relatively transparent information” (PR)

00:16:41
"The City just overall became incredibly more transparent and changed their outlook in terms of making information available to the citizens”; information and reports that came out were hugely beneficial in helping people understand the science behind what was happening, and also understanding the urgency of the situation; "internationally I think the way that Cape Town started communicating to its citizens at that time is now being recognised that this was a really novel and very good approach, and so I think the City has received a lot of acclaims for putting out that information in the way it did” (MV)

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Prof Martine Visser
Professor: School of Economics, University of Cape Town

Dr Kevin Winter
Senior lecturer: Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town

Priya Reddy
Director: Communication, City of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Dr Piotr Wolski
Research associate: Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• A range of demand management policy instruments were deployed over an extended period by the city government to effect household behaviour change and water usage reductions
• Collectively, these were successful in effecting a reduction of consumption by around 50% over a two-year period, which got the city through a multi-year drought of unprecedented severity
• Not all measures were equally effective; empirical research has been done to determine which measures were effective and which less so
• Prices in Cape Town are too low to have an effect; on a theoretical basis economists did not expect even large price increases to have a significant impact; this was borne out by the data
• Restriction level increases on the other hand were effective: a third of the overall 50% reduction was achieved by the early restriction level increases to levels 2 and 3
• An effect can be seen where price increases were bundled together with restriction level increases
• This demonstrated that through simple restrictions the city government was able to deliver a clear message to households
• While traditional measures did reduce demand, it had not been reduced sufficiently given the severity of the drought; further reductions were needed, and a more extreme communication campaign was launched by the city government to achieve this
• Another third of the overall 50% reduction was achieved later in the crisis by the announcement of the disaster management plan and the Day Zero communication strategy, which coincided with the rollout of other sources of information by the city government
• Releasing clear, salient information to citizens empowered them to make big behavioural and lifestyle changes to which there had been previously been substantial inertia

00:00:05
Hooks:

• The success story was the way Cape Town managed demand (RE)
• Water use reduction was only way to get out of predicament (PW)
• What we did get right was ability to reduce consumption (XL)

Initial demand management strategy using traditional policy instruments had some success: demand was reduced but not sufficiently, given the extreme circumstances; more extreme measures were required and implemented, and these were successful in inducing more reductions:

00:00:50
DEMAND MANAGEMENT POLICY INSTRUMENTS: WHAT WORKED?

• Range of policy instruments: pricing mechanism, restrictions, behavioural nudges
• Prices in Cape Town too low to have an effect; confirmed empirically
• First real dramatic reduction (third of overall 50% reduction): achieved with restriction level increases to levels 2 and 3
• Surveys confirmed that across the board and across income levels households made huge behavioural changes (MV)

00:06:27
NEED FOR FURTHER DEMAND REDUCTION: DAY ZERO COMMUNICATION STRATEGY AND DISASTER MANAGEMENT PLAN

• Consumption of around 600 million litres per day was above quota level, which was equivalent to 478 million litres per day (IN)
• Further demand reduction needed, but had not been achieved anywhere in the world, or previously in Cape Town (CP)
• Need to jolt people out of comfort zones (CK)
• Uncertainty of what lay ahead triggered decision to intensify communication strategy (XL)
• The announcement of the disaster management plan brought about the second large drop in consumption (18% compared to two years prior) (MV)
• Releasing clear, salient information to citizens empowered them to make big behavioural and lifestyle changes (MV)
• Day Zero as a communication tool was very effective (PW)

00:15:34
Close:

"We have the ability, we know how to live off a little bit less water than everybody else" (PW)

00:00:50
"Over this two-year period we saw a dramatic reduction of almost 50% in terms of drop in consumption amongst households across the city …; so it’s really a phenomenal story and then what one wants to know is, well, given that the City has rolled out these interventions, there were restrictions, there were tariff increases, there were campaigns, what worked, what really sort of engendered this big change? If you look at the ambit of policy instruments available for water demand management it’s interesting to see what people were more responsive to and what they were less responsive to, but also how one can combine them in practical ways that are effective”; pricing mechanism, restrictions, behavioural nudges; range of carrot and stick approaches to inducing changes in behaviour; "I think right from the start we knew and most economists sort of are of opinion that the tariffs in Cape Town is just way, way too low compared to what it is internationally, it doesn’t value, you know, water as a scarce resource …; and so the tariff structure really isn’t at a level where small or even more dramatic increases in tariffs would have had any effect; and that’s exactly what we saw …; where we did see that it had an effect was when the tariffs were bundled with certain restrictions”; early restriction level increases (to levels 2 and 3) effected the first real dramatic reduction; "of the overall 50% reduction that we saw amongst the domestic households in the city, level 2 and 3 together accounted for about a third of the overall, of that reduction; so that is really an interesting learning, that through using simple restrictions you can get a very clear message across to households …; people really feel that they made a difference themselves by changing their behaviour, because that’s what they did; I believe that the citizens of Cape Town really saved the day”; surveys among households with different income levels showed that across the board huge behavioural changes were made in order to meet the demands around the drought; what is different obviously is the level of investments people were able to make; "I think there was a huge behavioural response; people felt actually quite empowered by seeing the level to which they could reduce their own consumption”; both surveys and empirical data show that high and middle income households did not respond that much to pricing changes – for them it was more the notions around social responsibility that drove their change in behaviour (MV)

00:06:27
The quota the city was given for the hydrological year that started November 2017 was equivalent to 478 megalitres a day; the city was using around 600; "So although we got it down, we hadn’t got it down enough”; already overused on quota, so had to make up during the rest of the year; "but that was the key – you see, this was the key matter, was not getting augmentation in place, it was getting the consumption down to the quota level; if we got it down to the quota level we would have got through” (IN)

00:07:21
The kind of demand reductions needed from citizens to get through the summer had not been achieved anywhere in the world, and had not been achieved to date within Cape Town either; hard threshold around 600 megalitres per day; trying to push it down for number of months, but not budging; "it just felt like we weren’t going to be able to get to it (CP)

00:07:48
"That risk, with no information at hand around rainfall patterns, that was I think the trigger point for intensifying the communication strategy in communicating very honestly and clearly where we were, and if we didn’t change our behaviour patterns where we were going to potentially end up”; it may seem dramatic and unfair to have landed that message but we have to bear in mind that Cape Town had already achieved quite a large reduction in consumption; low-hanging fruit had already been achieved; "but what the uncertainty of what [lay] ahead required was for us to do so much more, and that’s what led to having to take a far more extreme approach, particularly around communications and the behavioural change initiatives that needed to be initiated to drive a impact or a result that required us to do so much more and go far and beyond what we had already achieved”; difficult to do when you’ve already cut back and streamlined so much; "it seems unfair to place an even greater demand on the public, but the time called on us to do that and that’s what informed the messaging in early 2018” (XL)

00:10:29
"We had been battling to break through the sound barrier with Capetonians on getting them to reduce their water consumption …; there was something that was needed to jolt people out of their comfort zones”; Capetonians had already been on water restrictions technically for ten years; "there had already been behaviour change over time, and something more was needed” (CK)

00:11:11
"The second really big intervention that we saw made a big difference was the announcement of the disaster management campaign”; huge media hype, newspapers articles about the national defence force getting involved if we were to run out of water, the City rolled out its plans for situation when we do run out of water; reduction of almost 18% compared to two years prior; "that is really again remarkable how releasing salient, clear, information to the citizens empowered them to make a change, a big behavioural change, lifestyle changes that there previously had been a big inertia in implementing; so I think for me one of the big lessons in terms of what works was really this roll-out of clear salient information”; at that point also the water dashboard and other forms of information made public by the City; "I think that was very powerful” (MV)

00:12:30
"The strategy of demand management was very very successful. The concept of Day Zero as a tool, as a means of communicating the need to save water, to reduce water use was very powerful and very effective; the inhabitants of Cape Town reduced their water use very considerably”; reduction of over 50% during summertime and in order of 20 to 30% in wintertime achieved; and summertime is very significant because that’s when majority of use happens; running now for extended period on roughly 500 million litres of water per day; compares to roughly 800 to 900 million litres per day in wintertime previously, and over 1,1oo to 1,200 million litres per day in summertime previously; "that required quite a lot of behavioural change, transformation of how we use water, what we use water for …; we managed to stay with that low water use, and that’s very important, and we managed to stay like this for a long time; in the beginning when the restrictions were proposed or implemented everybody was like, you know, it’s impossible to comply, we can’t do this because you are used to, you know, running lots of water through your taps, through your bathrooms, through your garden watering, but once you get used to this, to the new situation, to the situation where you save water, you can see you can do it, and it doesn’t become, it’s no longer a nuisance, it’s a normal thing …; and that’s an important, very important lesson that Cape Town has learnt; and I think in general we are in the forefront of the world in this, because many different cities all around the world will have to learn that lesson, will have to go through that at one time of the future, because we’re not going to have more water, we’re going to, in many different places we’re going to hit the limits to the resource and situations like this will be there” (PW)

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Dr Rolfe Eberhard
Independent public policy advisor

Dr Piotr Wolski
Research associate: Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town

Councillor Xanthea Limberg
Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services and Energy, City of Cape Town

Prof Martine Visser
Professor: School of Economics, University of Cape Town

Alderman Ian Neilson
Deputy Mayor: City of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Craig Kesson
Chief Resilience Officer: City of Cape Town

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• Business can play a key role in a water crisis, both as a water user capable of dramatically reducing its own consumption and as an influencer encouraging water savings by others
• In Cape Town during the crisis the private sector demonstrated high degrees of creativity, innovation and adaptability when forced to react and respond by rising costs and the risk of running out of water
• Solutions that were previously unviable became cost competitive when the price of water increased; businesses were willing and able to incur investment costs with a view to recouping these through savings on operating costs over time
• In some instances, such as the construction industry’s replacement of potable water with treated effluent to mix cement, the drought and corresponding water price increases acted as catalyst to fundamental changes in how the economy is clearing, and this will be permanent: there is no economic driver to revert to using potable water, as the latter is more expensive
• Businesses achieved reductions in water use ranging between 40 and 60 percent
• In the case of some businesses with national operations, the cost savings they were able to achieve in the Western Cape led them to roll out the same approaches elsewhere
• Beyond adjusting their own consumption patterns, businesses also fulfilled a number of other roles, starting with the role of influencer within their own systems of supply chains, customers and staff, and expanding to their communities and broader society
• Large public-facing corporates cooperated to ensure that the messaging emanating from them was consistent, and aligned with the messaging emanating from local government, for continuous reinforcement of messaging from multiple sources
• Businesses also made available donor and sponsorship funding to the broader society through CSI and philanthropic activities to encourage and assist in water savings
• Businesses reported a sense of responsibility to help during crisis

00:00:05
Hooks:

• Private sector highly adaptable and responsive when it has to be (CP)
• Success story in Cape Town was the ability to change rapidly (DG)

Widening circles of influence – from own water use to influencing supply chain, staff, customers, broader society; broadening motivation – from cost savings to sense of responsibility:

00:00:55
BUSINESS AS USER: DRAMATIC REDUCTIONS POSSIBLE

• Businesses were able to achieve substantial reductions in water use: numbers ranging between 40% and 60% quoted (CP, MM, NS, DG)
• Possible because private sector is impressively responsive, adaptable, innovative, and able to invest to reduce consumption (CP, MM, DG)
• Reducing consumption, rather than augmenting supply, was the solution (MM, DG)
• Price increases major driver: solutions previously not viable became cost competitive when price of water increased (MM)
• In some instances the drought was a catalyst in effecting fundamental and permanent system changes around water; example of replacement of potable water by cheaper treated effluent in construction (MM)

00:12:08
BEYOND OWN USAGE REDUCTION: BUSINESS AS INFLUENCER

• Businesses were able to play a role as influencer within their own systems, including supply chain, customers and staff (CP)
• Business also has importance and influence in society; able to magnify and reinforce messaging (CP, FK)
• Business willing and able to deploy funds in innovative campaigns driven by CSI / philanthropic considerations to assist in effecting water savings (CP)

00:15:01
Close:

"we felt it our responsibility as a business based in the city to do that" (FK)

00:00:55
"One of the other key lessons that has come out of the crisis is the role that business can play in the midst of a crisis"; changes in water use effected by businesses incredibly impressive; survey showed businesses managed to reduce their water consumption by 41% on average; particularly impressive when one considers how water intensive the production processes of many of these businesses are; required huge amount of innovation and investment; "so I think that the kind of key thing for us to recognise there is that when the private sector is forced into a situation where they kind of have to do something, their ability to react and respond and invest is incredible; they mobilised so quickly, and they were able to change their behaviour patterns and production patterns incredibly quickly"

00:02:16
Adaptations and campaigns across a number of sectors; in manufacturing and commercial sector several businesses went ahead with their own augmentation; "the very interesting insight is a lot of the lessons that those businesses learnt themselves reflect very credibly the lessons that the city learnt, which is that it’s a little bit more expensive than you thought it would be, it takes longer than you thought it would, and there may be less water"; knee-jerk response by many companies was to go straight for augmentation – this was in almost all instances the incorrect knee-jerk response; correct focus is on reducing consumption; starts with metering, monitoring, behaviour change; businesses they worked with reduced their consumption by 45 or 50 percent on average, in many instances without augmentation; "it’s just really about understanding where water is being used in your business ineffectively or inefficiently, and trying to stop that where you can"; sliding scale of cost and complexity: as you move closer to augmentation the cost and complexity escalate; smaller interventions are cheaper, deliver better return on investment, and are much simpler to install and manage; change in water tariff was big driver: increased price of water opened the door to solutions that previously weren’t economically viable, but now are cost competitive; fear of running out of water also a driver, "but in the commercial-industrial sector we saw a real ability to reduce overall costs by investing in solutions that would make you more water efficient"; example of construction industry switching from potable water to treated effluent for mixing cement – considerably cheaper; "that switch will be permanent; there is no reason for them, there is no economic driver for them to go back to using potable water if using treated effluent is significantly cheaper; and these are the real exciting stories in my view, is that you’ve seen fundamental system changes in how we interact with water, with the drought as a catalyst for real change in how an economy is clearing"

00:06:39
Saw many examples of how for businesses water went from being no concern to a major focus; example of large national retailer that reduced its consumption in Western Cape stores by 40% overall through simple measures; then asked themselves why they’re not applying same measures in rest of country when massive cost savings are possible

00:08:38
Growthpoint Properties managed to cut its water consumption by 54% over two and a half year period to September 2018

00:09:09
V&A Waterfront as large landlord worked with tenants to coordinate collective steps, pool knowledge, and cut through rumour and speculation; limited augmentation measures available; biggest area they focused on was limiting consumption; held regular meetings to maintain forum to dispel rumour and cut through to what the facts were, and also to share best practice, particularly around cutting consumption; knowledge base and great benefit from working together and sharing knowledge; tried to shift emphasis from augmentation to reduction in consumption; "in broad terms the Waterfront would consume 5 million litres per day, and we’re down below 2 million litres a day, so somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 percent we have, and that’s a sustainable reduction …; I think the sort of success story in Cape Town is the kind of adaptability and resilience and creativity to change, and change rapidly, and adopt these kind of measures rapidly"

00:12:08
Businesses also played an important role beyond reductions in their own consumption: "businesses also fulfilled a number of other different roles, so the other role that we saw was as kind of an influencer within their own system": supply chain, customers, staff; "it has a role within society that often has importance and has influence, and using their ability to kind of magnify the messages that they needed to get out there was incredibly powerful, so really kind of driving home that everyone needed to kind of take responsibility"; saw businesses taking care of their staff, realising it’s not only how employees behave around water at work, but also what happens when they go home; saw examples of companies that sponsored plumbers to go to staff’s houses to install new fittings and help fix leaks; saw businesses come to the fore when it came to more CSI / slightly more philanthropic kind of approach: "how can we mobilise some of the funds that we have available to assist the broader community in this particular situation?"; Smart Water Meter Challenge with schools: such a simple idea -- a corporate would sponsor to have a smart meter installed at a school; "we saw this again and again, of corporates or businesses that were in a particular area, and they say: ‘how can we help more? is there a way that we can give access to a school or to the guys that live close to us to another source of water, how can we help with education campaigns?, what more can we do to help the City of Cape Town? can we give them a donation? would it help if we ran campaigns on our own budget?’, you know. All these different kinds of ideas was really … where a number of businesses really saw themselves as a partner, and they wanted to respond to this in the best way that they could"

00:15:02
Woolworths accelerated communication to customers around water: "as much as possible to engage with customers on what was going on around them and to encourage them to save water"; important was that they collaborated with industry peers to ensure that everybody was on message: "there should be one message; so what we did, and our competitors, we all had the same, it might have looked different in terms of look and feel, it would be on our brand, but it was all around 50 litres and what this 50 litres can do and what you should … because we knew that the messaging, if it was not consistent and everywhere people would start getting confused, people would … there was elements of disbelief around, you know, the question is this really true, is it excuses to charge us more for water, and so one of the things we wanted to make sure is that in a responsible manner we were reporting or encouraging the same kind of information the City was encouraging and they were reading it in the newspaper and were reading it in another retailer and seeing it wherever else they went … and so continuous reinforcement of messaging was something that we realised …; there was a lot of engagement with customers; we felt it our responsibility as a business based in the city to do that and to be a conduit for information; we needed to talk as a business to our stakeholders, to our suppliers, to our staff, to our customers, to ensure that we were all on board on the same and we were all preparing for the same potential eventuality"

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

David Green
CEO: V&A Waterfront

Mike Mulcahy
CEO: GreenCape

Nardo Snyman
Sustainability specialist: Growthpoint Properties

Feroz Koor
Group head of sustainability: Woolworths

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• A tension between water resilience and fiscal resilience arises whenever water is sold at a charge linked to volume of water consumed; successful conservation efforts that enhance water resilience by reducing consumption simultaneously reduce the revenue of the water provider, detrimentally impacting its fiscal resilience, with inevitable consequences for maintenance of the infrastructure and the longer-term physical resilience of the system
• As a result, local authorities are often hesitant to encourage water savings, even under conditions of increasing scarcity
• This tension is exacerbated in situations where a substantial proportion of the population does not pay for water and is cross-subsidised by paying users
• Particularly against the backdrop of climate change, a pricing model solely linked to consumption is redundant, unsustainable and in need of revision
• A fixed-cost component to the water tariff goes some way towards alleviating this tension, by partly delinking water use and the revenue of the water provider
• This makes it clear to users that they pay both for use of the system and for the water they consume: the fixed tariff pays for infrastructure and the water system as a whole, and the consumption tariff pays for water used
• This secures a minimum revenue base for the water provider
• For many users it does mean their water cost goes up; it also negatively impacts the business case for water-saving investments made on the basis of a pure consumption tariff, lengthening the payback period
• A simple two-step tariff structure without any reduced rates for initial consumption, with a higher basic rate, a punitively high rate for excessive water users, and continued cross-subsidisation of the poor, is an alternative

0:00:05
Hooks:

• City perversely incentivised to encourage water consumption; conservation as threat to city’s financial sustainability (MV)
• Water demand reduction success stories help water resilience but create real problems for municipal revenue (HD)
• This creates disincentives for the implementation of waterwise strategies (GZ)

• Notion of tension between water resilience and fiscal resilience explained
• Some of its implications highlighted (GZ, KW, MV, CP)
• Need for new approaches to pricing model motivated (GZ, MV)

• How a fixed-charge component in tariff helps to address the tension by partially delinking water use and fiscal revenue:
  • 00:08:36 fixed cost used worldwide, often linked to size of pipeline to property; impact on thinking: distinction between paying for water and paying for infrastructure that delivers it; helps both mindset and securing fixed income regardless of consumption levels; helps stabilise revenue (KW)
  • 00:09:55 both structure and level of tariffs can be manipulated; fixed tariff to pay for infrastructure and system as a whole; consumption tariff to pay for use; in July 2018 fixed tariff introduced in Cape Town for businesses and households; two side-effects pointed out (HD)
  • 00:11:28 case for simple two-step tariff structure as alternative (MV)

00:13:01
Close:
The aim is a much more sustainable pricing model where the city’s finances are not reliant on selling one of the scarcest resources we have (MV)

00:01:07
"From a resilience perspective there’s a tension between getting people to reduce water use […] and making sure there’s enough money in the system to run it efficiently and well; … and so there’s a fine balance between wanting people to reduce water [consumption] and actually having enough money to run the system”

"You’re on a resource that’s increasingly unsteady, and is needing to be conserved, and you’re selling water at a particular price in order to sustain the system in order to subsidise the poor; and that equation in terms of the imbalance of a scarce resource … and you still need to subsidise, is an extremely difficult balancing act”

"The city I think was still a bit wary of getting people to … save too much because inherently … there’s this sort of tricky relationship between too much savings and the city being financially resilient, so I think when it’s not dire the city is sometimes reluctant to motivate citizens to save too much”

00:02:49
During the Cape Town crisis, many users went off-grid, mainly by accessing groundwater with boreholes, which affected municipal revenue. But a household user that is completely off-grid with its potable water supply is still using the sanitation system. Sanitation is charged for as a percentage of the user’s water bill. "So if you’re no longer receiving any potable water to your residence but you’re still using the sanitation system, you’re paying nothing for … the sanitation services”

00:04:07
"The less water that is used, the less revenue there is, which creates a tension between water resilience and fiscal resilience, so new ways of thinking about financing water are needed”

00:04:52
"The fiscal model of how the municipality resource water and service delivery needs to be looked at very closely; the current model, what it does is it requires the municipality to sell as much water or electricity as possible in order to finance service delivery, also [the delivery of] other services, non-water-related”

The impact of the need to cross-subsidise the poorest part of the population

"This model really isn’t sustainable, not when you’re talking about conserving water and operating from a water-scarce base, because there’s always perverse incentives almost for the city to encourage households to consume more water, and any kind of attempts to get households to conserve is seen as a threat to the financial sustainability of the city”; this models prevails in South Africa and most other countries in the world; "the crisis in Cape Town has given us the opportunity to really lead that conversation of why this model is redundant and how it needs to be changed”

00:06:37
How municipalities are funded; "municipalities have a real challenge in terms of potentially reducing one revenue source; what’s also important to recognise within a country like South Africa is municipalities have to cross-subsidise across their services as well …; so there’s a portion of the population that doesn’t pay for water; but part of those water charges and payments are funded or cross-subsidised by those who do pay for water; so it’s quite a complex situation, and it also means that when the city for example reduces its water demand, while that’s a success story in terms of water resilience and avoiding a potential Day Zero, it creates a real problem in terms of the city’s municipal revenue”; after the crisis, does one want bounceback to pre-drought usage levels or not? bounceback would mean buffer not maintained, and insufficient allowance for future population and economic growth

00:08:36
Fixed cost introduced as part of tariff; linked to size of pipeline entering the property; introduced in Cape Town during the crisis; "what it does, it starts to change people’s thinking a little bit about where water comes from; it doesn’t come from a tap but comes through a long line of pipelines that have to be carefully managed before it reaches your property; you’re not paying for water – you are paying for the infrastructure that delivers it; that’s a useful way of managing both the mindset but also of ensuring that there’s a fixed income at the same time”; revenue stabilised at a time of varying price levels

00:09:55
Structure and level of tariffs can be played around with; fixed tariff to pay for infrastructure and system as a whole; consumption tariff based on how much water you use; in July 2018 fixed tariff for both businesses and households introduced in Cape Town; for a lot of people that means their basic cost of water goes up; "it means that you secure at least a significant portion of revenue to manage the city’s water infrastructure, which is what they need in terms of making sure that they’ve got a well maintained system that doesn’t lose water through leaks etcetera”; it does also mean businesses and households that don’t use too much water might be hard hit by the introduction of the fixed tariff; it also affects the business case for investments made on the basis of a pure consumption charge – payback period lengthened

00:11:28
Fixed charge really good idea: it helps cover basic service delivery cost, and it takes away the link between water consumption and fiscal resilience; "but at the same time I think there’s also easier ways to structure the tariff”; no free basic water initially; simple two-step tariff; proviso that poorest part of population always provided for; "that’s a much more sustainable model to ensure that water is being valued at its true worth, that you still have cross-subsidisation for the poor, but that you don’t have this model where the city’s finances is reliant on selling some of the scarcest resources that we have”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Prof Martine Visser
Professor: School of Economics, University of Cape Town

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape Government

Assoc Prof Gina Ziervogel
Research chair: African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town

Dr Kevin Winter
Senior lecturer: Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• The decision by authorities to use the Day Zero communication strategy should be seen against the backdrop of the situation at the time: in order to get through the dry summer months to the next rainy season, water use by citizens had to be driven down even further than it had already been at that point by traditional tools of restrictions and tariff increases – the level of demand reduction required had not been achieved before either in Cape Town or anywhere else in the world
• The strategy consisted in communicating to citizens that under a so-called Day Zero scenario water reticulation to most households would be turned off, and they would have to collect daily rations of 25 litres per person from about 200 collection points to be set up around the city – and that this was imminent
• Opinions diverge on whether this communication did reduce demand
• There is a widespread view among commentators that it drove down demand, and that in reality people must have been scared into behaviour change
• Empirically, however, it is hard to quantify the impact, as several mechanisms were applied at the same time in the early months of 2018: aggressive pressure management, tariff and restriction level increases, and the Day Zero campaign
• This leaves open the possibility that in reality the campaign had a larger effect in the media and on levels of fear and anxiety among the public than on actual water use reduction, and that in reality the bulk of the 70 to 80 million litre a day reduction in use is attributable to aggressive pressure management
• The campaign had major negative impacts: on tourism (at the peak, as much as a thirty percent reduction in V&A Waterfront hotel occupancy rates, compared to what these could have been given the rising trend), on investor confidence levels, on trust in the city government and officials, on the social fabric of the city
• It should be borne in mind that it did play a role in jogging into action disaster relief activities by the national government, and also probably played a role in making clear to the national Department of Water and Sanitation that curtailment of agricultural drawdowns (not enforced the previous year) was unavoidable
• There is a case to be made that the costs outweighed the benefits
• If measures had been taken earlier, at the beginning of the dry summer months, to drive down demand, Day Zero messaging – and its attendant costs – could have been avoided

0:00:05
Hooks:

• Day Zero messaging necessary but comes with major negative impact (XL)
• Reputational damage for the city was severe (IN)
• Had huge positive and negative impact; difficult to imagine surviving the drought without it (CP)

• The decision to implement the Day Zero communication strategy was taken against the backdrop of a need to induce citizens to reduce their consumption even further than they had already done (CK, CP)

• Can’t imagine surviving drought without it (CP)
• Hard to put a number on effect of Day Zero (BW)
• Did also help to jog into action disaster relief and curtailment of agricultural drawdowns (MM)
• Avoidable, unnecessary; cost much higher than the benefits (RE)

• At the peak of the damage the impact was close to a thirty percent reduction of what tourism numbers could have been
• Tension between economic interest of important sector and need to keep users under pressure to reduce consumption
• Terminology, language and imagery were negative, with negative consequences for tourism that are hard to reverse (DG)

• All the economic consequences of the Day Zero messaging could have been avoided had the appropriate steps been taken earlier
  • 00:15:15 make decisions swiftly, implement restrictions and price increases early, accelerate demand management, to avoid having to communicate such a message (XL)
  • 00:18:27 if high tariffs and pressure reduction had been implemented earlier, in November 2017, at the beginning of the summer season, Day Zero messaging would not have been necessary (IN)

00:00:55
"We had been battling to break through the sound barrier with Capetonians on getting them to reduce their water consumption. It was remaining static at around 680 megalitres a day. And so I think that from what I understood of the contours of the decision making there was something that was needed to jolt people out of their comfort zones. And you must remember at the time that this was introduced Capetonians had been on water restrictions technically for ten years. There had already been behaviour change over time. And something more was needed.”

00:01:36
"The kind of demand reductions that were needed from the city’s citizens to be able to get through the summer had not been achieved anywhere in the world, and had not been achieved to date within the city either. So there seemed to be kind of quite a hard threshold of around 600 megalitres per day, we’d been trying to push it down to 500 for a number of months and just not getting anywhere, it was not budging. So the need to be able to push that demand, it just felt like we won’t be able to get to it.”

"I think the concept of Day Zero … is an interesting thing to reflect on because in some ways it was almost a concept and campaign that generated a life of its own, and it was almost like the City initially resisted it, and they didn’t like the term, they understood that it would have an impact in terms of the brand Cape Town, as well as investor confidence, they understood those implications.”

"And then I think the key shift was really when they understood where you could utilise Day Zero as a behaviour change campaign, and really trying to link the water usage now to a potential date in the future as to when we could possibly run out of water, and quantifying that.”

"Day Zero has had obviously some negative implications … the kind of social fabric of the city, I guess the credibility of some of the government officials … it obviously has impacted on investor confidence and tourism numbers, but it did a number of really important things that perhaps without that level of drama it would have been difficult to achieve.”

"It drove down consumption significantly within the city of Cape Town”; it also became clear to the national Department of Water and Sanitation (which had to curtail agricultural consumption) that this curtailment had to happen for the city to avoid Day Zero.

"So I think it had a huge impact … both positive and negative, but I can’t imagine surviving the drought without it.”

00:04:14
Day Zero was the day the city authorities would shut down supply to most individual households and start distributing water in a different way, not through the reticulation system any more, but manually through the water distribution points.

"In my opinion it wasn’t a particularly good idea as a solution to water shortage – it was a very powerful communication message, it was a very powerful message to communicate the need to reduce water use, because … at this stage … the reduction of water use was the only way we could get out of that predicament.”

00:05:25
The city authorities published its critical water shortages plan and created a mock-up of what the water distribution points would look like; "I think that did scare a lot of people … not that it was the intention, but it did, in reality it must have.”

00:05:53
"You can talk about a percentage of dams or so many megalitres a day, you can throw … much data around, even there’s so much left in the dam – well, so what? what does that mean? Something that people really do understand is a date. And I think for that reason that was the one piece of data that stuck in everyone’s mind. We were putting out lots of data, but that’s the one that became focused on.”

"The mayor then made the announcement that it was ‘almost inevitable’ that we would get to the Day Zero scenario, and that was during January 2018. That created significant concern, panic … Certainly one can say that it probably did contribute towards people focusing their minds on getting the consumption down, it contributed together with all the tariffs and the pressure reductions etcetera.”

00:07:38
"It’s hard to work out what drove what, but certainly around January / February [2018] consumption started falling, from around 600 million litres a day down to around 530, sometimes … down to 520, and it kind of stayed there. And at that time it was the Day Zero campaign but it was also pressure management that was being implemented in a big way … and then it was the tariff increases as well … So there were three things playing themselves out and that’s why it’s hard to put a number on Day Zero.”

00:08:41
"The question is: was it necessary? If that announcement had not been made, could we have still achieved our reductions?”

00:08:53
"Day Zero was a captivating message, that I think really captured not only the imaginations of Capetonians but the global community … So certainly as a communications and imagination capturing device it was extremely effective. Day Zero I think also increased the realisation of the population in South Africa, the severity of the crisis. It also would have jogged into action several of the disaster relief activities and responses that are available through the national government, and it certainly would have increased pressure on the national Department of Water and Sanitation to curtail some of the agricultural drawdowns, which in previous drought years hadn’t necessarily been applied.”

"More broadly than that, Day Zero came with a few negative consequences. The perception of the region, a range of travel advisories for tourists that would come into Cape Town, resulting in some hotel nights lost, or bed nights lost.”

00:10:16
"A key effect of Day Zero was reputational damage to the city. Tourist numbers were significantly reduced, investments were put on hold, and Cape Town became known as the city that would run out of water. This was a fear-based strategy, with the intention of scaring people into reducing consumption. In my view, Day Zero was unfortunate and unnecessary for two important reasons. The first reason is, if the system had been managed effectively in the early stages of the drought the threat of a Day Zero would not have existed. And secondly, it was not necessary because there were effective mechanisms in place to reduce demand, namely the pricing and pressure management. Those two mechanisms proved to be effective because demand has remained low even though Day Zero became cancelled.”

"If you were to do a cost/benefit analysis of the Day Zero strategy, I think one would come to the conclusion that the costs of the strategy were much higher than the benefits.”

00:11:21
"The peak of the damage, the impact on tourism numbers – this is international tourism and we’re measuring this by the occupancies in the fifteen hotels in the Waterfront – it was between fifteen and twenty percent reduction. Now that is against the background of Cape Town over the last three/four/five years following 2010, tourism numbers had grown by eight percent. So at the peak of the damage you’re close to thirty percent reduction. So this was quite damaging to a valuable part of the economy.”

"Unfortunately the impact of the Day Zero messaging was incredibly strong internationally, and tourists felt a moral responsibility to avoid coming to Cape Town because they didn’t want to drink Capetonians’ water. There was a point where the realisation in the tourism industry was that the bigger crisis was the economic crisis that this Day Zero messaging was going to have. So there was a conflict between the messaging which the City and the Province were putting out, understandably, with a view to holding down and keeping people pressurised to reduce their water consumption, but that was playing out internationally as affirmation of the likelihood of this crisis, and this was exacerbating the potential economic damage that would be suffered.”

"There was tension building between the longer-term economic interest – here you had a growing business, industry, providing jobs, economic growth which is absolutely needed – which was being throttled by possibly over-zealous publication of plan B, and Day Zero.”

"The Day Zero messaging was a plus and a minus. It was definitely a very strong catalyst which led to dramatic and rapid reduction in the consumption which allowed us clearly to have averted the crisis. But, on reflection, the terminology, the language, the imagery used was negative, and has left a negative impression internationally which is very difficult to move on. And I guess on reflection perhaps other terminology, other messaging could have been used which would have achieved the result of reducing consumption but would not have had quite such a negative impact internationally.”

00:14:37
"To get to a point where the possibility was there that we would not be able to supply water to our people, the most basic of all our services, was a very severe knock on our credibility of being a city that’s able to supply services to everyone, and to supply them at a good level. So that reputational damage was severe for us, with the belief got out there that we were going to run out of water.”

00:15:15
"The Day Zero messaging, even though very necessary, when you are facing the very real possibility of water scarcity, does come with major negative impact that you will have to contend with, during and after the crisis. It does have a major impact on confidence levels within the city, trust, all of these things you’re going to have to re-invest a significant amount of time, resources, to repair and undo. It had a major impact on tourism as well, and given that that’s quite a large economic sector we are having to try and deal with the impact of that, and we have already started doing so.”

"When you’re in a situation where there are limited alternatives and the very real risk of a large city running out of water, the Day Zero messaging was probably very critical to communicate. And that had a major role to play in how consumption dramatically reduced. However, I think prior to getting to that point it’s about making decisions that are informed, and making those decisions swiftly, so you can move into implementation, and so that would in hindsight always be the option that I would suggest, and ensuring that simple things such as restrictions are adopted far sooner, not hesitating to make adjustments from a financial mechanism point of view, not placing all of your hopes on one option, but diversifying your options so that you can minimise your risk.”

"So it’s about balancing the risk depending on where you are, and what options you have available, but I would always opt for doing the less extreme thing, which is communicating a message like that, which is obviously going to generate a lot of anxiety and fear, and opting to accelerate demand management, water conservationcy, financial remodelling of cost of services, implementing augmentation or whatever the case may be, cutting back on those not so significant projects and programmes, taking the political risk for greater good and for water sustainability and water security, before having to communicate that very honest and what is quite a scary message.”

00:18:27
"I certainly believe that if we had implemented the extreme measures of high tariffs, pressure reduction, etcetera, earlier on, in November, at the beginning of that summer season, it wouldn’t have been necessary. I think those would have been adequate measures to focus people’s minds, to achieve it, I don’t think we should have got to the stage of this general belief that Cape Town was going to be, as it was said, the first city to ever run out of water, I don’t think that’s a correct statement, but that was what was being said, going out on international media, and I think we could have avoided that, there could have been lower economic consequences if that statement had not been made, but contingent on us having acted earlier to get the consumption down.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Councillor Xanthea Limberg
Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services and Energy, City of Cape Town

Alderman Ian Neilson
Deputy Mayor: City of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Craig Kesson
Chief Resilience Officer: City of Cape Town

Dr Piotr Wolski
Research Associate: Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town

Barry Wood
Manager: Bulk Water, City of Cape Town

Mike Mulcahy
CEO: GreenCape

Dr Rolfe Eberhard
Independent public policy advisor

David Green
CEO: V&A Waterfront

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• In mid-2017 the Cape Town city government conceived a large-scale augmentation plan in response to the water crisis; the plan was for a build programme to augment the city’s water supply capacity by around 500 megalitres a day, through desalination, re-use and groundwater
• This was to be accompanied by steps to drive down the city’s demand to 500 megalitres a day, from more than 600 megalitres a day at the time
• The plan was motivated by contemplation of the catastrophic consequences for Cape Town of the no-rain scenario, and the fact that the city was not able to source water from elsewhere
• Furthermore, the city was reliant on the national Department of Water and Sanitation as the bulk supplier of water, as well as on the department’s willingness and ability to use its powers to curtail agricultural drawdowns from the dams once agriculture had reached its quota for the year; the city could not assume that the department would curtail agriculture in the summer of 2017/2018 as it had not done so in previous years
• Building 500 megalitres of additional supply capacity turned out to be unfeasible and unrealistic as a solution to the crisis, due to limitations of cost, impact on tariffs in subsequent years, time, procurement capacity, environmental regulation, and professional staffing requirements for implementation
• Cape Town’s existing supply capacity is between one billion and one and a half billion litres of water a day, put in place over a two hundred year period; it was just not realistic to think that between a third and a half of that capacity could be replicated within a year
• The experience with desalination was that it turned out to take longer and be more expensive than you expect, particularly temporary desalination plants
• The experience with groundwater in this case was that where water quality was good, volumes were low, and where volumes were high, quality was poor
• The grand plan was abandoned in favour of three small temporary desalination plants that came on line only after the crisis period when the rainy season had already started, producing insignificant amounts of water, at eight times the cost of surface water; these had no impact on staving off Day Zero
• In the end, reduction in demand was the only way to get out of the predicament: dramatically ramped-up restrictions, and aggressive pressure management

00:00:05
Hooks:

• The City developed a plan to build itself out of the drought (RE)
• The timeframes were impossible; the costs were horrendous (IN)
• Very tangible experience by the City that it was not possible to build itself out of the drought (RE)
• Try not to fall into the temptation of believing you can build yourself out of a drought (BW)

00:00:55
THE 500 / 500 PLAN

• In 2017, plan accepted by city government to reduce demand to 500 megalitres a day (from more than 600) and build additional supply of 500 megalitres a day from a combination of desalination, re-use and groundwater (CK)
• Driven by: catastrophic consequences for Cape Town of a no-rain scenario, combined with inability to source water from elsewhere (CK); citizen pressure on leadership to be seen to be doing something (BW); lack of trust by the city government in the national Department of Water and Sanitation’s capability of supplying water into the system, but specifically its willingness or ability to curtail agricultural drawdowns from the dams, as these had not been curtailed in previous years (CP, MM)

00:08:08
THE PLAN MUGGED BY REALITY

• Building 500 megalitres of additional supply capacity turned out to be unfeasible and unrealistic as a solution to the crisis, due to limitations of cost, impact on tariffs in subsequent years, time, procurement capacity, environmental regulation, professional staffing requirements for implementation (CP, IN, PW, CK, BW)
• Experience with desalination turned out to be that it takes longer and is more expensive than you expect, particularly if it’s temporary; experience with groundwater in Cape Town turned out to be that where water quality was good, volumes were low, and where volumes were high, quality was poor (MM)
• Grand plan abandoned in favour of three small temporary desalination plants that came on line only after the crisis period when the rainy season had already started, producing insignificant amounts of water, at eight times the cost of surface water (PW, RE)

00:18:16
THE FALLBACK ON DEMAND MANAGEMENT

• In the end, demand management turned out to be the only option: extraordinary restrictions + pressure management (PW, CK, RE, BW)

00:00:55
"We put to the political leadership which had asked us to evaluate the crisis: what happens if it doesn’t rain? It was a very simple question. We asked senior officials and senior political leaders: if it doesn’t rain, what happens to the City’s approach? Is it possible to get water from elsewhere? Is it possible to augment the supply with existing schemes? And the answer was No. At that time, in middle 2017, around May or June, the dams were at a very low level; they’d dropped below 20% percent in Cape Town, which globally would spark, long before that, an emergency response, and as the winter months progressed in Cape Town the rain was not coming, and every week that went by the dams would drop further and further, and so the parameter of if the rains don’t fall became the major feature of the planning. Of course there were analyses and rejoinders of, what if the rains do fall, or some of them, which would later become a feature in our risk planning and our adapted approach to augment supply, but for the outer frame of reference, it was a question of: if there’s no rain, Cape Town’s finished.”

"Based on a series of conversations and some data analysis that we did during the week of scenario planning, we came up with the rough figure of approximately 500 megalitres a day, which would become the City’s lodestar in the year to come. And essentially we said, well, if 500 megalitres of water a day is required, how much are we using a day, how much have we been historically using a day, and how much do we possibly supply, or could we supply? So it was a very simple way of understanding the complexity of how do you balance two sides of an equation. And that led to a presentation to decision makers to say, ultimately, what we want to secure is 500 megalitres a day, that is via managing demand and hopefully managing supply.”

"The plan that was accepted, based on the different options we gave to the leadership, in the first instance was augment the supply by 500 megalitres, in some way, and reduce demand to 500 megalitres. We had risk assessments of how likely we thought that was, but we were essentially reverse-engineering from a scenario of this is what would be needed in order to survive.”

00:04:15
"When you talk about more and more severe restrictions, often in the eyes of the public that is deemed to be a failure. I mean: why are you cutting back on our water supply? You’ve clearly as the local authority not perhaps planned correctly for this. People put aside the drought, they’re not thinking of that. So politically it’s also quite difficult to give assurance to your constituents that by saving water we’re not going to run out, we’re going to protect the economy of our city, and that we haven’t failed. So, you know, during these times of crisis there’s obviously a lot of pressure to do more, and one of the first things that’s talked about is, well, let’s try and build something. People do that in their houses, you know, I’ll install a rainwater tank and harvest rainwater from my roof.”

00:05:13
"The city of Cape Town is not the only user of the dams that we rely on. So agriculture is also a significant user; they utilise about a third of the water annually that comes out of the dams but all of that water is used during summer, when we really really need it. And in previous years the national Department of Water and Sanitation, which is responsible for managing the entire system, did not ensure that agriculture was reduced in terms of their allocations despite the fact that the city had been adhering to the restriction levels. So there was a concern that as we were leaving winter, towards mid to late 2017, and we could see that the dam levels were not recovering at the rate that they should, and that in fact we were at a real danger of running out of water during the course of that summer, that there was a risk that agriculture would not be curtailed to the extent that was expected, that the City decided there had to be a way of augmenting and supplementing the existing supply with new supply.”

00:06:23
"The result of a lack of trust in the regulator, the Department of Water and Sanitation, meant that the City started to take on more responsibility than is typically required of cities. It is the Department of Water and Sanitation’s legal obligation to provide water into the system, whether that water is done through desal, or re-use, or through dams, through ground or surface water, it is the Department of Water and Sanitation’s responsibility to provide that. The lack of trust that the City had in the regulator and in the Department of Water and Sanitation’s ability to provide that water into the system meant that the City decided that their own augmentation strategy needed to compensate for that, which is why they came up with this number of 500 million litres per day, that the City wanted to begin to investigate and invest in to be able to be comfortable that if it didn’t rain again the citizens would be safe and have enough water, and that if the Department of Water and Sanitation didn’t provide any further inputs that the City themselves could take responsibility to provide that water.”

00:07:38
"The City developed a plan to build itself out of the drought. This plan was to build 500 million litres per day of capacity over a very short period, six months, on the assumption that that capacity could be provided and would be sufficient to meet reduced needs of the city. This capacity was going to come from desalination, temporary desalination, some groundwater, and re-use, also temporary re-use.”

00:08:08
"An RFI, or request for information, was sent out in June 2017, and this was really asking for solutions, so, we’re facing what could be a very serious water crisis, at that stage the full scale of it hadn’t been really understood or quantified, how could you help us solve this? What could you do to help us? And there were dozens of solutions that were, in fact I think there were over a hundred solutions that were put on the table and proposed to the City. On that basis they went out for an actual RFP or for tender to actually see what the price points of those solutions would be, how fast they could be delivered on, etcetera. And I think it was at that stage, once the actual tender responses started coming in, that it was really starting to be understood that in terms of the cost of this augmentation, it was going to be by far the largest procurement programme any South African entity had ever done, and the speed with which it could be implemented would, even at the fastest rate that the City was able to push through, that in terms of the technical and technological restrictions on it, that it still would be too little too late, that actually it wasn’t going to save us from the crisis.”

00:09:26
"A risk analysis was conducted and we went backwards and forwards on that, and eventually we came up with a scenario where we would get the consumption down to around 500 megalitres a day, and we would build alternative water supplies that would supply 500 megalitres a day. So that was great in theory. But I think as that progressed further during 2017, timeframes were set by which we would have to have these in place, I think it became increasingly understood that this was an unrealistic programme. That the timeframes were impossible for providing those additional supplies, the costs were horrendous, the projections that were shown on what we would have to increase water tariffs by in subsequent years 200% and more, you know, these just showed that this was to some extent an impossible dream. It was just not realistic to believe that a water supply system that had been built over decades, using the least cost method, could suddenly be replicated within a year. It was just not realisable.”

00:11:01
"And one has to put that in perspective. That augmentation plan was to provide 500 million litres of water per day within the next nine months, essentially until the rainy season of 2018, and, you know, if we take that value and compare it with the water supply capacity of the current system, which is above one billion litres of water a day, so it’s roughly one and a half billion litres of water per day, that augmentation plan was for one third, perhaps half of the current water supply capacity. And we have to realise that they wanted to build in nine months … considerable part of something that was created within two hundred years, because that’s how long it took to bring the Cape Town water supply system to the stage where we are now. So that wasn’t particularly realistic, and it was realised pretty soon afterwards that, you know, that it’s not going to happen, for many different reasons, partly financial, partly bureaucratic and administrative, and it wasn’t happening.”

00:12:19
"I think from a professional perspective where the Water Resilience Task Team changed in its approach between June and August / September of 2017 is that once we had recalibrated the costs and the operational and project realities of delivering a 500 megalitre augmentation programme, our professional assessment was that it would be almost impossible to do, and certainly within the timeframes that we were given. And that if you wanted to pursue it, even if you could find additions to the budget, the real problem was capacity. And my biggest concern was getting things through the procurement system, which would have to be reprioritised to accommodate the tremendous burdens that we would be asking of it in order to do 500 megalitres of augmentation, as well as the actual professional people to deliver such a programme.”

00:13:26
"There’s a lot of things that go with build programmes, like getting through environmental regulations, the actual infrastructure planning itself, procuring the services of professional service providers, contractors, etcetera. So while you can fast-track it, and the City did really well at pulling down those kind of timeframes, the reality is that it’s, practically, it is hard to build quickly, it is difficult and it’s almost impossible to bring big quantities of additional water on quickly. If you look back in terms of our consumption at the beginning of 2018, around January 2018 to February of 2018, the city dropped its consumption dramatically – it was around 70 megalitres a day over that time period. You cannot – that was within about two to three months – you cannot build a new plant or a new resource to supply you 70 megalitres a day in three months. It will take you three years.”

00:14:32
"The City spent six months in very detailed planning for this programme, with a huge focus on augmentation. It turned out that the augmentation was extremely expensive and could not be delivered in time to make any meaningful impact on the dams during the summer of 2017/2018. In particular the temporary desalination plants were very very expensive, and would not in any way assist in building resilience into the future because they were temporary.”

00:15:05
"So after the grand plan of 500 million litres per day, it was realised that that plan was maybe overly ambitious. The City began to build a range of smaller augmentation projects and programmes, and today we’re left with three small temporary desal projects that are on line and producing water, a range of aquifer projects that are on line and producing water. The lessons that were learned during that procurement were extremely interesting. The big ones around desal were it takes longer and is a bit more expensive than you think, particularly if you’re signing short-term contracts. The lessons around groundwater in the Cape Town case specifically was that where they had higher volumes of water the quality was fairly poor, and where they had high quality of water the volumes were very low. So there’s a range of wells that have been sunk, and groundwater will remain part of the City’s strategy, but effectively the response from the private sector and the communication about how easy and how fast augmentation could come online was tested and was effectively found to be inaccurate – that it takes longer, is more costly, and in some cases there’s less yield than was anticipated.”

"In reflection of the 500 million litres per day strategy we realised that it would be several years faster than any of the existing large-scale desal projects to be able to have large-scale desalination on line with those sorts of timeframes.”

00:16:51
"You know, in the beginning a couple of initiatives, a couple of augmentation schemes were hailed as a significant achievement. But if we think about a thing like a small desalination plant that provides 5 million litres of water per day, what it does to the Day Zero, to the day we hit the ten percent of water storage in the dams, it shifts it by minutes, virtually minutes ahead – it’s not substantial in any way.”

00:17:29
"These capacities are tiny, and the contribution that these plants made to dam levels by the winter of 2018 were absolutely insignificant.”

"The relative cost of temporary desalination compared to the surface water scheme – so the temporary desalination would cost about R43 a cubic metre, the surface water schemes on average, including treatment, costs about R5 per cubic metre, so it’s a factor of 8 between the two.”

00:18:16
"So after that couple of realisations it came to the situation where we realised that really the only solution to avoid running out of water is to do the demand management and to implement very strong restrictions in the amount of water that people are allowed to use.”

00:18:40
"I knew that if we said, well 650 would be OK, that we would still hover above that point. So to get it down realistically to close to 500 megalitres or even just below 600 megalitres we had to ruthlessly push the 500 megalitre figure every single day. And so that was when, in around August 2017, through the task team, we decided to explore more aggressive pressure management interventions, to reduce demand, and to begin modelling those and to understand how they worked, because we would need a change not only in consumer behaviour, which had already been driven for the previous decade, but a change in actually managing how much is going through the system.”

00:19:32
"There was a very tangible experience by the City that it was not possible to build itself out of the drought, that once the drought hit, its only real, realistic option was to manage demand to get through the drought. I think the implication of that, or the extended learning from that, is that the City needs to ensure that it has infrastructure in place before it is needed, rather than waiting until it is too late. When low rainfall comes, it is too late to invest in building new infrastructure, because building substantial new infrastructure takes years in planning and construction and implementation, and the only way you can get through a drought is through managing demand.”

00:20:19
"My advice to water managers in similar situations is: look to optimising your system, and don’t be scared to ask people to use less water. It’s always possible to reduce your water use. Try not to fall into the temptation of believing you can build yourself out of a drought. The problem is you don’t know how long the drought might be in play for, and also you might find yourself building something that when normality returns is then shelved. You know, there have been other cities in the world where you start a build programme, but you commission it and then it starts to rain.”

00:21:01
"Before the leadership met to consider the range of data and scenarios that were put in front of them, including from myself, there were water restrictions in the bylaw only to a certain point. They would later be developed, a greater degree of restriction, I think we developed another three or four levels of them, but they didn’t exist before that point, which meant that the level of demand reduction that we were motivating for from a resilience perspective had not been contemplated before. So considering those data points and remember the data point of, if we’ve got Day Zero over here, and we are trying to balance the equation of 500 supply / 500 demand, but we don’t have the mechanisms to match the requirements of such demand reduction, we had to build them into the system – literally, we had to legislate for them. We had to create teams that would go out and physically do the pressure management on the ground in ways that defied their own expectations, and that’s what pulled us through. And, of course, the people of Cape Town themselves, without whom the government would not have been able to manage this crisis.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Dr Rolfe Eberhard
Independent public policy advisor

Alderman Ian Neilson
Deputy Mayor: City of Cape Town

Barry Wood
Manager: Bulk Water, City of Cape Town

Craig Kesson
Chief Resilience Officer: City of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Mike Mulcahy
CEO: GreenCape

Dr Piotr Wolski
Research Associate: Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• While the prospect of manual collection of daily rations of water scared Capetonians accustomed to reticulated water supply, the reality is that a substantial proportion of Cape Town’s population live under Day Zero conditions whether there is a drought or not
• It is not unusual for an informal settlement dweller to have to walk 5 minutes to a tap or toilet, queue for 20 minutes to get 25 litres of water for the day, and carry the water to her home in a bucket on her head
• Municipalities aim to supply one toilet for every 5 households and one tap for every 20 households
• In reality, in some instances the ratios in informal settlements are as high as 50 to 70 households per toilet and 140 households per tap
• There are 140,000 households in Cape Town living in informality, amounting to more than 500,000 people, out of the city’s total population of around 4 million; they use only 5% of the city’s water
• Communities in informal settlements had already come up with innovative and resilient solutions to living with water scarcity, and would have been able to teach many lessons to middle-class households coming to terms with it during the crisis
• The crisis made existing social differences more stark, with some people able to buy bottled water, install rainwater tanks, drill boreholes, or planning to leave the city for overseas or holiday homes elsewhere in the event of a serious crisis; this raised serious moral questions around access to basic necessities during a crisis
• Usage levels across income groups converged during the crisis: before the crisis high-income households were consuming dramatically more water than low-income households; usage data show high-income household consumption levels steadily declining over the crisis period, and at the peak of the drought even overtaking low-income household consumption
• Research interviews confirm households across the board making behavioural changes; as opposed to the divisiveness, free-riding and finger-pointing which was often emphasised, there was also cooperation and community-building
• The city’s new water strategy needs to take people in informal settlements and their situation very seriously, and integrate it into the overall plan; part of the challenge is that improved access to water (such as flush toilets) will increase total water demand

00:00:05
Hooks:

• The crisis made social differences more stark (FK)
• There’s another side to this problem: people who’ve been living Day Zero since they moved into an informal settlement (CZ)

00:00:59
THE EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE OF AN INFORMAL SETTLEMENT DWELLER

• Uses 25 litres of water per day; walks 5 minutes from her home to the nearest tap, then queues for 20 minutes; carries the water in a bucket on her head to her house; walks 5 minutes from her home to the nearest toilet, that is often flooded or blocked
• 728 households in her settlement, with 2,076 people; between them they have 6 taps (MM)

00:03:32
ACCESS TO BASIC SERVICES: ISSUES AROUND RATIOS AND QUALITY

• 140,000 households in Cape Town living in informality (informal settlements and informal structures in backyards), amounting to well over 500,000 people
• Municipalities in South Africa aim for ratios of 5 households per toilet and 20 households per tap, both within 100 to 200 metres walking distance – international standard for emergency situations
• Reality in Cape Town sometimes much worse, with 50 to 70 families sharing a toilet, and as many as 140 families sharing a tap
• And quality of service delivery can also be an issue (CZ)

00:11:27
SOCIAL DIFFERENCES WERE EXACERBATED DURING THE CRISIS …

• The crisis made social differences more stark, with some people able to buy bottled water, install rainwater tanks, drill boreholes, planning to leave the city for overseas or holiday homes elsewhere in the event of a serious crisis – raising moral questions (FK)

00:12:28
… BUT THERE WAS ALSO CONVERGENCE IN USAGE

• Before the crisis high-income households were consuming dramatically more water than low-income households; during the crisis usage levels converged across income levels (MV)

00:14:45
TO BE HOLISTIC, FUTURE WATER STRATEGY HAS TO TAKE INFORMAL SETTLEMENT DWELLERS INTO ACCOUNT

• Big proposition: nothing for us without us (CZ)

00:00:59
People living in informal settlements tended to complain that it was the more well-off people living in the suburbs who were using more water, with their pools, baths and showers – all non-existent in informal settlements; the suburbanites in turn used to complain that it was the people in informal settlements who were wasting water.

"I use 25 litre per day for washing, for me to wash and to cook … and I take 5 minutes to go to the tap to fetch some water, 5 minutes from my house, and then I queue for more than 20 minutes; I carry the water from the tap by putting it here [on my head], then to my house. It’s 5 minutes to go to the toilet; we are sharing the toilets, who are always blocked … That thing is a challenge and is a mess because there’s always flooding, drainage, and blockage of the toilets.”

There are 728 households in her settlement; 2,076 people who are living there; between them they have 6 taps. "When they are broken, the City takes long time to maintain. That is a challenge to us.”

00:03:32
Ratios municipalities try to aim for in South Africa: 5 households per toilet, within 100 or 200 metres walking distance; 20 households per tap, within a similar walking distance. These figures are considered acceptable [internationally] in terms of emergency relief. "The reality inside of informal settlements is that people live with a situation that is much worse … and in some settlements where you’ve got high density and a high population, you can easily get in excess of 140 families sharing one tap or 50 to 70 families having to access a toilet. There are instances where there are areas that are better than others, but overall … the reality is that many people, this half a million that we speak of, have an access to basic services which is quite low, and then the quality of the service can also be problematic.”

In Cape Town there are over 140,000 households living in informality, which is defined to include people living in informal settlements (collections of shacks constructed of zinc, cardboard, plastic) and people living in similar structures in backyards of formal homes. "Both sets of people have issues around access to basic services.” These over 140,000 households easily number more than 500,000 individuals in Cape Town – "so it’s quite a significant proportion of the population that is essentially living in a situation where they don’t have good or decent access to basic services; and then on the flipside Cape Town is known for being the Mother City, major tourist attraction, often saying having European-level infrastructure, but there’s two sides to the story.”

"There was clearly a misconception around what life is actually like inside of those informal settlements and what access to water actually looks like. So this thing that many middle-class people were fearing, which was I’m going to have to pick up a can and go and stand in a line for who knows how long to get my ration of water was the reality for informal settlement dwellers every day … The informal settlements use about 5% of the city’s water supply. And so now if you think of that 5% for that half a million people, and Cape Town is maybe four and a half million – three and a half / four million – you suddenly realise that that is a very very bad misconception.”

"The challenges that the informal settlement communities were facing are so different to what was happening in terms of this fear that was starting to well up inside of basically the middle class in the city … We deal with people who’ve literally been living Day Zero since they’ve moved into an informal settlement. There’s always not enough water, queueing for water was a reality, not something that you have to think, oh, but what’s going to happen? how am I going to get by? This idea of people having to reduce their consumption, which I know had lots of people who live in formal houses thinking, how am I going to do this? 87 litres per person is such a little, and now you want us to go down to 50 litres per person, and we’re working with communities who can have a hundred, two hundred people queueing at a tap in the morning, trying to collect one bucket of water to see to their daily needs, which could be like 25 litres for the day per person, or for a family. So the challenge, the experience was different.”

"If anything, we were looking at this and saying: how do we get others to actually see the innovative and resilient solutions that these communities have already developed in terms of tackling scarcity of water? If anything, they could probably show a household how to get by on way less water than what we are used to … So our experience in terms of the drought space was a very different one. Our job was to try and get that voice in there, to get people to understand, OK yes, the drought is a major problem, it’s a concern, but there are a whole set of people who have a different experience.”

00:11:27
"Given where we were going, it could also exacerbate a situation of haves and have-nots … What about people who can’t afford to buy [bottled] water? Must we force them to stand in queues while the privileged can buy water? And what about all those people who could sink boreholes? And, I mean, we had areas where people were still watering their lawns [with borehole water], and they felt it’s my right to, I’m drawing, but I mean that’s a common resource … If you have to start thinking about it from the bigger perspective of what does it say about society, and who has access to these kind of basic necessities? I mean, either you can buy your way out of the problem, or you suffer, and then there are those who are even more privileged – you just leave the city of Cape Town, so there were considerable people who were saying, I’ll go to Johannesburg, or I go overseas, or I go to my holiday house, and these were genuine conversations you had, and then you just realised that it also causes the inequality to be much more pronounced.”

00:12:28
"One of the things that I find really fascinating about citizens’ response to the Cape Town drought was if you look at sort of a graphic of different income quintiles and how they behaved over time, you start off at the beginning of the drought with high-income households consuming dramatically more than low-income households, and over time, as the drought escalated, these [high-income] households came down, came down, came down until high- and low-income households converged in their consumption, and at some point, at the peak of the drought, the high-income households even overtook the low-income households. And one may argue that they had more access to resources, installing rainwater tanks, some of them being able to access borehole water, and so a certain sector of the population going sort of off the grid, but to a large extent I would also argue that those households in some sense stepped in where the City wasn’t able to deliver. But as a whole, we see that all these groups made drastic changes to their consumption over time and really made a behavioural effort. We interviewed households, and it’s clear that across the board everybody were going around carrying water in buckets from the shower to flush the loo, for instance, and for me it’s a really empowering message of how a city as divided as Cape Town can come together and really made a change; make a change and really sort of save itself from this imminent crisis, and I think that is a very heartening thought for other cities as well, that citizens can come together like this and make a massive change. And in some sense that is also community building, rather than being divisive and being about finger-pointing, that people realise that they could make a difference, but that everybody had to work together. So, it’s like really from a behavioural insights perspective the message of cooperation, that people stop free-riding and relying on others’ behaviour but rather come together and that everybody makes a huge effort, and in the Cape Town case we really saw that.”

00:14:45
"As I sit here today and think about the area of work that I’m involved in, that our organisation is involved in – informality in the city of Cape Town – it raises a lot of questions around where are we going? How are we going to tackle this in the future? Because we are pushing for increased access to basic services for these informal settlements, and ideal is this aim for a flush toilet, for example, and it does beg the question that this means increased water usage, so how do you balance that equation, how do you bring a half a million people who are basically living in Day Zero conditions up to a standard that is OK, but in an environment where Cape Town’s water situation is going to get probably, this might be the new normal for us for the next decade.”

"The solution is a complex one, but our big proposition is that, and I’m going to refer back to something our community partners always say, is: nothing for us without us. And I think that’s the big issue here, is like, this [the city’s new water] strategy, to be a holistic one, it needs to take informal settlements and their situation very seriously, and integrate it into the overall plan. I mean you want an holistic strategy, and part of that is definitely having to consider the people that actually have a very different relationship to water than the majority.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Feroz Koor
Group head of sustainability: Woolworths

Charlton Ziervogel
Managing Director: Community Organisation Resource Centre

Mavis Manyati
Community leader: Block 6, Philippi

Prof Martine Visser
Professor: School of Economics, University of Cape Town

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• From the start, in the planning for the Day Zero scenario within government, it was clear that the planning and preparation for it was going to be extensive, multifaceted and demanding, as it entailed challenges of public finances, logistics, communication, safety and security, and health risks, and would not work with the elderly and infirm, for whom alternative arrangements would have had to be made
• The more it became clear how this manual water distribution system would work, the more it was understood within government how damaging it would be to the city and its residents
• It was understood within government that its biggest efforts had to be directed towards avoiding getting to that scenario, while at the same time the plan had to be worked out, in place and ready to be implemented should it become necessary
• Once business started unpacking the implications of the plan, it became evident that it could potentially bring parts of the economy to a standstill
• With water supply cut off in some areas but kept on in others, such as informal settlements or central business districts, you could have people descending on areas where water was still on, instead of queueing in their own residential areas
• It was also challenging to decide which areas were strategic business areas, and to define clear boundaries demarcating these; it was very difficult to figure out how you would keep the economy going
• Outside the city's reticulation system, water isn’t very mobile: a simple point that becomes obvious when you start carrying water around in 25-litre containers
• There were serious concerns about the practicality of the plan; it could only have worked as part of a bigger system to take care of the elderly, the infirm and people working in essential services
• There was a lot of anxiety, anger, uncertainty and fear at the time; it is a scary conversation to map out what could have happened; if it went on for a few weeks, what you would effectively have is the world’s largest refugee camp
• The Day Zero plan could only have worked as part of a bigger plan that included answers to questions such as how to provide the elderly and infirm with water
• If Day Zero had actually happened it would have been an absolute catastrophe for the city – an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, among others

00:00:05
Hooks:

• Once you started unpacking the concept of the water collection point system, you realised it was not realistic to expect that society would otherwise carry on as normal once this had been started (FK)
• I don’t know how it would have worked, and thank heavens we didn’t find out (KK)

00:00:50
CONCEPT ORIGINS; GOVERNMENT PLANNING

• The concept originated in disaster management planning
• From the start, in the planning for the Day Zero scenario within government, it was clear how extensive, multifaceted and demanding the required preparation for it was going to be
• The system entailed challenges of public finances, logistics, communication, safety and security, and health risks, and would not work with the elderly and infirm
• The more it became clear how it would work, the more it was understood within government how damaging it would be to the city and its residents
• It was understood within government, consequently, that its biggest efforts had to be directed towards avoiding getting to that scenario, while at the same time the plan had to be in place should it become necessary to implement it (IN, XL, JPS)

00:11:11
FAR-REACHING IMPLICATIONS

• Once business started unpacking the implications, it became evident that it could potentially bring parts of the economy to a standstill (FK)
• If it went on for a few weeks, you would effectively have the world’s largest refugee camp (GG)
• With water supply cut off in some areas but kept on in others, you could have people descending on areas where water was still on (AB)
• There was a lot of anxiety, anger, uncertainty and fear (XL)
• Scary conversation, mapping out what could have happened (NS)
• Big concerns about the practicality of it (AR)
• System could only have worked as part of a bigger system (CD)
• Real headache to figure out how you would keep the economy going; there were a lot of gaps in the system (HD)
• Outside the city’s reticulation system, water isn’t very mobile (KK)
• There is no way it could have worked (GK)

00:30:33
ABSOLUTE CATASTROPHE

• If Day Zero had happened it would undoubtedly have been an absolute catastrophe: economic and humanitarian catastrophe (CP)

00:00:50
The concept of Day Zero originated in disaster management planning.

“Certainly it was the day on which our lives would have changed very dramatically. Because the more we got into looking at what was required for Day Zero and for that distribution system the more it became evident how it would completely damage our city, our populace, our way of life, our ability to create an income; people’s lives would be heavily damaged.”

There were health risks, for example, that could arise from the sewerage system if it was not being flushed properly.

Had to work out how many distribution points were needed, and how many taps per distribution point; the City built one to test how it would work in practice.

Looked at safety issues and what kind of security the City would need to provide, “because the risk of public disorder obviously would be very, very high in those circumstances”.

Had to look at how people would be able to transport a 25 litre canister to their home.

Looked at elderly and the infirm: how would they get water? Started a process of working through community organisations to put in place a help system.

Also worked together with bottling companies so they would bottle 1- and 2-litre bottles of water, and use their normal distribution systems to get it out to shops across the city.

Also looked at supply of water to children at schools.

00:05:11
“We were doing everything in our power and pulling on a range of resources to avoid getting to that worst-case scenario, but at the same time, as a responsible government we needed to make sure that we actually had a plan in place that was well-resourced and well-thought-out and well-planned to deal with that worst- case scenario.”

During weekends and after hours a range of departments in the city government were working on planning the points of distribution system.

“All of that planning was going towards putting a disaster plan in place, so that at the point ever we needed to initiate the points of distribution that we were ready to do so. So all of those things were happening as of the time that myself and the deputy mayor were leading the drought response and essentially there was regular monitoring of how effective we were in terms of the implementation of all of these interventions.”

00:06:49
A lot of discussion inside city government around how communication should work and what preparations needed to be for these distribution points; also the very last point at which city government could pull the trigger to implement the plan, because it came with a price tag of several hundred million rand, “to implement large water collection points, managing the additional infrastructure that had to go in for that, the logistics, the staff implications, and the disruptive impact on the rest of service delivery, never mind the dire consequences for everybody’s day to day life.”

00:07:23
“It was very clearly, once one looked at it, that the scenario of that happening would just be so damaging to our city, and to its future, that our biggest effort had to go into avoiding getting to Day Zero, and that’s essentially where we focused, but in the meantime parallel to that we had to get on with the planning of all of these sites.”

00:07:49
Water collection points would be rolled out a couple of weeks before; phasing in of Day Zero cut-offs to different areas would be staggered; “the cut-offs wouldn’t all happen simultaneously, and you would be able to implement new collection PODs, as we were referring to them, gradually whilst cutting off new areas continuously, a) so that you had a staggered implementation, so that you could manage the behaviour change required – it would be disruptive, it would have traffic implications, people would have to change their commuter patterns, etcetera – and if you tried to do that in one single go across the city the disruptions would be impossible to manage. So the saner approach would be a staggered series of cut-offs across the city, with about a month lead time at best, but you wouldn’t want to pull the trigger earlier than that.” If the points of distribution had been built in January 2018, the City would have spent several hundred million rand, which in the end it was able to avoid spending.

“From early on we realised that operationally with the points of distribution that the City’s available enforcement and emergency services resources and what the South African Police Service could supply, we would have difficulty having an adequate twenty-four-seven coverage at all the points of distribution to ensure safety and the effective running and zero disruptions at these facilities, and we started realising that civil society would need to help us manage these facilities, assisting people with carrying full water containers, managing the overall security of the site, assisting with the direction of vehicles and preventing blockages, and that we just didn’t have enough traffic officials to cover all, to have covered two hundred sites twenty four hours a day.”

Also realised there would be a sizeable proportion of the public that would not be able to access points of distribution.

“There were around two hundred identified points of distribution, with anything up to two hundred or more standpipes per point, and double-sided standpipes at many of those, so we wouldn’t have difficulty getting all the public to go through them every day. But that’s easily calculated on a piece of paper. It’s easy to calculate that you can get every single citizen in your city in a five to seven minute gap through one of these facilities and still have spare capacity, … technically it’s possible; logistically, however, making that happen, making sure that people distribute themselves equally across the city and that people don’t for instance go the points nearest to their places of employment which would concentrate very large volumes of people trying to go on their way home with their motor vehicle to a few water distribution points so that effectively thirty or forty PODs were carrying the vast majority of the traffic, that would become challenging, both from a comms point of view and also from a disaster management, from the risk levels implied.”

00:11:11
Forums were pulled together where city and provincial government engaged with business, starting September-October 2017. “There was the first time we got a sense from government, well this is what this means and this is what we’re forecasting, and that focused the minds of everybody.”

“One of the things we found, and this is no criticism to government, is that their initial planning from their perspective took into account where their expertise lay, but I think once they started engaging with business and we all started discussing what the potential impact is, a lot of things arose which potentially may have not been front of mind, because ultimately … somebody at that meeting from government said you know, yes, we’re envisaging Day Zero, this was the first time for example we heard of water collection points and all of this, so we knew about it a few months before they made it public and it was for us to do some planning, but what we also realised then is that perhaps there wasn’t an appreciation of what the potential impact would be wider than that in the sense that I think the feeling was that yes there would be water collection points, but we want society to carry on as normal; and I think once we started unpacking that we realised: well, just how realistic is this?”

Thinking through the implications of a Day Zero, starting from the perspective of a retailer, made clear how disruptive such a scenario would be.

“And suddenly once we started thinking of this we realised that this is an impact that – literally we could have come to a standstill.”

“Once you started thinking about it and unpacking it you realise that potentially you could have a situation where parts of your economy would come to a standstill.”

00:15:43
“If Day Zero was just going to happen for two days we would be fine, but if it was going to go on for three weeks or longer it literally would be a change in how society works. I mean, it would be easy to argue the basic foundation of modern civilisation is indoor plumbing. So not having water delivered to your taps is a big deal.”

“I mean, how do you deliver water to four million people? … If Day Zero plus twenty were to happen, and we all had to stand in line to get water, what you would quickly experience is the world’s largest refugee camp, basically.”

00:17:36
Taps were going to be kept on in informal settlements. Problem that people from neighbouring communities where taps had been shut off might descend on areas where taps had not been shut off, with prospect of water wars. A similar problem existed around central business districts and industrial areas where water also would be left on, as people might steal water from work, effectively, rather than queueing for it in their residential areas. “So all these were tense questions swirling around in the debate, and for a while there were no answers – no one was stepping up and saying this is the way forward.”

00:19:16
“There was a lot of anxiety at that time, and anger, uncertainty, and, I think, fear, in what that eventuality, potential eventuality, may look like, and whether we would be able to manage it appropriately, given the scale of, you know, the city and the number of residents, and how when one is dealing with such a scarce resource, you know, you can’t necessarily control all aspects, particularly not human behaviour.”

00:19:57
Growthpoint Properties had excess water being pumped out of the basement at a building in Woodstock called The District; the implications of a Day Zero scenario became clear to them when they started realising the security risk if it would become known that they had water in the building when people did not have water. “You would have people bashing down doors, you know, regardless of LSM, trying to access this water. If you have no water for your family at home, and you hear about this building that has water, … you’ll break in there to get it. So that was kind of when it kind of sank home, saying regardless of how well we prepare, what really happens when the taps run dry? … I think it’s actually a scary conversation to be had if you actually map out what could potentially have happened.”

00:21:11
“It was really very, very difficult situation if we ever developed into that situation to actually practically have that working. The City did a lot of work from a technical side and the logistics side but we had big, big concerns about the practicality of providing water to people by queueing for water every day.”

00:22:03
“I think the points of distribution system could only have worked if it was part of a bigger system. It could not have worked on its own.” The reason for that is that a lot of people such as the aged, the infirm or people working in essential services would not have been able to access it.

“Within the whole context of what was happening I think it was part of what could be a very good system, but not as a stand-alone system, I think there were too many other, you know, x-factors, if you like, the unknowns that might have impacted on it.”

Another concern was how long it would have taken for people to be able to move through the system.

“I think you know when you going in a prolonged kind of disaster like this you start getting a deterioration in people’s morale and issues like that and then it starts becoming a problem.”

Another concern was the spread of diseases through the contamination of containers.

“So I think it was a system that had a lot of merit to it, but it needed to work within a bigger picture.”

00:23:42
Work done by the provincial government with city government as a key partner to determine what the strategic economic zones were that should not be cut off. “But the key issue very quickly became how do you identify strategic business areas.” Problem that industrial areas are within much broader residential areas. A lot of businesses aren’t in any set nodes, and are dotted all over the city.

“It was a real headache in terms of trying to figure out how you could keep the economy going through a crisis should Day Zero have hit.”

Another concern was whether employees would even be able to get to work, whether they would rather queue for water for their households and families.

Another concern was how the transport system might be affected when people running the transport system are collecting water. Explored the idea of certain businesses providing what was called a sub-POD service, where the business would provide water to its employees.

“Thankfully we didn’t get to that point because I think there were a lot of gaps in that system that really hadn’t been resolved yet.”

00:26:06
“How it was actually going to work? How’re you going to get five thousand people, and you’d have to drive there, because you can’t carry that weight of water for any distance, so how it was all actually going to work was something we were just hoping and praying we wouldn’t have to face, and I think that’s one of the biggest lessons that I learnt, is that outside of the city’s reticulation system water isn’t very mobile, if it’s not raining. You know, how do you get it to your home?”

“I don’t know if … I don’t know how it would have worked, and thank heavens we didn’t find out.”

00:27:45
“My viewpoint: truly for a city like Cape Town to run out of water, it would be pretty much like Armageddon.”

“From my point of view our responsibility as a city, and especially for Water and Sanitation, was to make sure that it didn’t happen. The fact is that the decision was taken in a boardroom far too quickly without any analysis, that points of distribution was the way to go … Intermittent supply would have been far less traumatic for a city. I mean if you have points of distribution just the logistics around it, and then also the sanitation aspect, because I was always really, really worried about the sanitation aspect.”

“To my mind the points of distribution would have had to be avoided at all costs, but the City wanted to have a disaster management plan for this, and they worked very well, and it’s probably a world-class plan in terms of how plans go, but I … thank the Lord that we didn’t ever have to test it because there is no way on this planet that I think it could have worked.”

00:30:33
“No I mean if we hit Day Zero I think that would have been an absolute catastrophe. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”

“If that had actually happened, I think that would have been an economic catastrophe amongst a number of other catastrophes, humanitarian, etcetera, would have occurred if it had actually happened, ja.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Feroz Koor
Group head of sustainability: Woolworths

Kim Kruyshaar
Owner: Green Audits Into Action

Alderman Ian Neilson
Deputy Mayor: City of Cape Town

Councillor Xanthea Limberg
Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services and Energy, City of Cape Town

Councillor JP Smith
Mayoral Committee member for Safety and Security: City of Cape Town

George Gabriel
Social anthropologist, consultant and facilitator

Andrew Boraine
CEO: Western Cape Economic Development Partnership

Nardo Snyman
Sustainability specialist: Growthpoint Properties

André Roux
Director: Sustainable Resource Management, Western Cape government

Colin Deiner
Chief Director: Disaster Management, Western Cape government

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape government

Dr Gisela Kaiser
Previously Executive Director: Informal Settlements, Water & Waste, City of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• The severity of the drought is not the sole or fundamental reason for the crisis: severe as the drought was, it would not have resulted in a crisis had the water supply system been managed effectively and in accordance with its own rules in the preceding years
• Had the system been operated according to agreed-upon rules and policies, dam levels at the start of the 2017/2018 hydrological cycle would have been as much as an estimated 18 percentage points higher, at 50 or 54 percent, rather than the actual 37 percent, and the situation would never have deteriorated to crisis levels – Cape Town would not have experienced the threat of Day Zero
• Alien vegetation was not cleared from catchment areas to the degree required
• There was over-abstraction from the system in the early years of the drought; releases to agriculture, in particular, were not done according to the rules; restrictions were implemented late and were not enforced
• Infrastructure maintenance, such as the clearing of silted-up canals feeding water into dams, was not done as required
• Pumps were not operating when they should have been, and transfers between dams were not made when they should have been made, resulting in a lower yield from the system than should have been the case
• The accurate modelling of the system was detrimentally affected by two factors: the model was not up to date, and its results are based on the assumption that the operating rules of the system are followed, which was not the case
• The national Department of Water and Sanitation has long been malfunctioning, plagued by leadership instability, financial mismanagement and skills erosion
• The severity of the drought therefore does not exonerate government from responsibility for the crisis; while the drought was indeed severe when set against the levels of assurance of supply and the severity of drought the system is designed to be able to cope with, the impact would not have been nearly as severe if the system had been managed effectively and according to its own rules
• It would consequently be misguided to place the emphasis on the drought as an extraordinary climatic event outside human control, as this takes the focus away from the underlying systemic issues – multiple weaknesses and failures in the operation and management of the system that should be addressed urgently to improve both water security and resilience to climate shocks

00:00:05
Hooks:

• If system had been managed according to the rules and had been managed optimally, dam levels end winter 2017 would have been substantially higher than they were, negating threat of Day Zero (RE)
• Had system operating rules been followed, Day Zero would not have been on the cards at all (GK)
• The longer-term management was inadequate (IN)

00:00:58
FUNDAMENTAL REASON FOR THE CRISIS: NOT THE SEVERITY OF THE DROUGHT, BUT FAILURE TO OPERATE SYSTEM ACCORDING TO RULES

• Water system is designed to cope with climate variability; if well managed and maintained, will be able to cope with drought periods without there having to be a crisis (RE)

00:01:52
LONG LIST OF SYSTEMIC MANAGEMENT AND OPERATIONAL ISSUES

• Alien vegetation clearing in catchment areas not done as required
• Releases, particularly to agriculture, not done according to rules, with resulting uncertainty detrimentally impacting city’s water security
• System and its infrastructure not maintained as required, an example being the silting up of canals supplying water to the dams
• Pumps not operating when they should have been, and transfers between dams were not made when they should have been, resulting in a lower yield from the system than should have been the case
• Restrictions were implemented late and were not enforced – as a result the system was over-allocated, and in the early part of the drought there was over-abstraction from the system
• Stochastic model of system not up to date, and its accuracy affected by fact that operating rules of the system were not being followed
• National Department of Water and Sanitation plagued by leadership instability, financial mismanagement and skills erosion (IN, RE, MM, CP, XL, PF)

00:04:19
HAD RULES BEEN FOLLOWED, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO CRISIS

• Dam levels would have been around 18 percentage points higher – at 50 or 54 percent, compared to the actual 37 percent – at start of hydrological cycle, had system been operated according to its rules, and the city would never have come close to crisis levels (GK, MM)

00:18:36
GOVERNMENT NOT EXONERATED BY SEVERITY OF DROUGHT

• Yes, drought was severe, but government should accept some responsibility, because impact would not have been nearly as severe if system had been managed effectively and according to rules (RE)

00:00:58
"It is misleading to see the water crisis only as a drought requiring a drought response. There are underlying systemic issues that influence the ability of the system to respond to periods of low rainfall. The danger is if the drought is only characterised as this very unusual event requiring a single drought response it takes the focus away from addressing the underlying issues.”

"The water management system in South Africa is designed to cope in a context of climate variability and will have to manage in a context of climate change. This system, if it is well designed and managed, will then be in a much stronger position to respond to periods of low rainfall, without there needing to be a crisis.”

00:01:52
"Certainly now, when we’ve been able to reassess some of the information, it’s very clear that, years back, when the Berg River dam was built, when what was called the Western Cape water supply system, operating system, was put into place, rules were determined at that stage how the system should be operated. And we now know that if it had been operated entirely according to those rules, we would not have got into such a low situation in our dam levels, that would have made all the difference in terms of how we had to react to it at the last phase.”

Many factors: required vegetation clearing in the catchment areas did not happen; the management of the releases of water in the early parts of the drought, particularly to agriculture, should have been limited more; there were issues of lack of maintenance, an example being the silting up of the canals supplying Voëlvlei dam; pumps in the Berg River supplement scheme not operating when they should have operated; "all of these together combined to this scenario; we know that the longer-term management was inadequate.”

00:04:19
"The way that the system operated was not ideal. And the theoretical calculation is that dam levels would have been 18 percent fuller [ie, 18 percentage points of dam capacity] prior to the winter of 2017, and that’s where our dam levels got to 20 percent.”

"Had restrictions been implemented, had the operating rules been followed in the system, then dam levels would have been significantly fuller in 2017, and Day Zero would not have been on the cards at all, I’m pretty sure of that.”

00:05:33
"The severity of the drought was not the fundamental reason for the crisis. The Western Cape water supply system is managed in terms of a set of allocations and then a set of rules around how restrictions are applied, and the availability of water is dependent on those allocations and rules being applied in the way that they were set out. And there’s evidence to suggest that the system was over-allocated and that people, users used more water than they were entitled to, and that restrictions, where they were implemented, were implemented late, and also not enforced, so in the early period of the drought there was over-abstraction from the system, more than should have been if the rules had been strictly applied.”

"On top of that, the availability of water is also affected by alien vegetation, and the estimation of how much water is available is dependent on assumptions about the control of the alien vegetation, and there’s evidence that the alien vegetation has not been controlled to the extent that it should have been, and that has also contributed to less water being available in the system.”

"A third factor has to do with the management of the system. So during the winter pumps need to operate, canals need to be cleaned to let water flow, and the timing of releases and the drawing from different dams needs to be optimised to get the most out of the system. If those factors are not done correctly, then the availability of water is also reduced.”

"And if you put those three factors together – the issue of abstractions, the implementation of restrictions, and the management of the system – if the system had been managed according to the rules, and had been managed optimally, if the allocations and restrictions and management had been done according to agreed-upon rules and policies, the level of the dams at the end of winter 2017 would have been substantially higher than they were, essentially negating the threat of Day Zero.”

00:07:45
"There are a range of management areas in the overall catchment and the overall system that could have been improved.” These include alien vegetation control and infrastructure maintenance. "Some of the analysis shows that the dams in theory could or should have had something in the region of 50 or 54 percent water, moving into this year’s hydrological cycle, when in reality it was closer to 37 percent as we entered into the drought.”

"Each of these individual pressures perhaps not enough to really precipitate a crisis like Day Zero, but when you start stacking the pressures on top of each other – over-allocation, sophisticated and contested users, a weak regulator, maintenance and alien invasive species control that could have been done slightly better – you start to really see how the system that is providing water to the city of Cape Town and broadly the Western Cape has a tremendous amount of pressure, and can be improved dramatically through some fairly simple interventions to increase the yield of the supply.”

00:09:47
Agriculture using about a third of water from dams; urban two thirds. "In previous years, the national Department of Water and Sanitation, which is responsible for managing the entire system, did not ensure that agriculture was reduced in terms of their allocations despite the fact that the city had been adhering to the restriction levels. So there was a concern that as we were leaving winter, towards mid to late 2017, and we could see that the dam levels were not recovering at the rate that they should, and that in fact we were at a real danger of running out of water during the course of that summer, that there was a risk that agriculture would not be curtailed to the extent that was expected.”

00:10:49
"Agriculture’s consumption was concerning to us. It was clear that national government weren’t enforcing restrictions and weren’t acting on non-compliance. Agriculture in the previous hydrological year hadn’t stuck to what they needed to consume; we were largely doing so. But agriculture in the summer periods draws more water than the city does, and so they were also a large risk to our overall water security, and the lack of enforcement was something that we were very concerned of at the time.”

00:11:33
"The national Department of Water and Sanitation is responsible to maintain much of the national water resource infrastructure that supplies cities and industries. The status of the national department is a matter of public record. There have been eight director-generals in a period of nine years, so a lot of leadership instability in the department. The department has been in the news for financial mismanagement and for audit issues related to its financial statements with serious problems related to project management and cost controls around projects. The capability of the department has eroded over time; it is I think a well-known fact that in many cases there aren’t the skilled personnel to be undertaking the planning and the infrastructure management and maintenance that is necessary to maintain South Africa’s important water assets.”

00:12:34
Stochastic model that is run simulating the operation of the dam system, giving probabilistic predictions of dam levels. Two issues: this model had not been updated for a long time; and the model is based on the assumption that the rules of the system are being applied, which had not been the case. Actual dam levels were starting to run outside the envelope of projections.

The system was not being managed as it should have been in terms of transfers between the subsystems. Excess water was not being transferred timeously between dams to avoid spillage as it should have been in terms of the policies for the optimal management of the system. The yield of the total system is greater than the sum of the individual yields – if it is operated effectively. But this was not done.

"The other rule that needs to be obeyed is the rule of restrictions. No water supply system anywhere in the world would be able to operate without some level of restriction at some point in time. Now unfortunately a lay person thinks when you go into restrictions the water supply system has failed. Now that’s not the case. Restrictions are very much part of effectively operating the system … It was being compromised now because the model wasn’t necessarily giving the absolutely correct picture going forward. And with the lethargy, if you like, of the department not applying restrictions timeously it also compromised the way in which this whole drought scenario played out.”

00:17:14
Before a drought complacency tends to set in. We should include inefficiencies in planning. This is not unique to the developing world or to under-resourced countries. Shortcomings and failures seem to be common around the world.

00:18:36
"There is an argument that exonerates government, which is based on the fact that the severity of the drought means that sufficient water could not be made available to the system. And to some extent I agree with that view because of the very low probability of such an event, and the system was not designed for that severity of event. At the same time, government should assume some responsibility because if the system had been operated in terms of its own rules and had been effectively managed, the impact of the drought would have not been nearly as severe.”

00:19:21
System was designed to give us a 1 in 50 year level of assurance of supply. But because of some of the management challenges in the system, in reality the level of assurance of supply was dramatically less. "Effectively this means that just by increasing the management and maintenance activities the city can have a pretty big increase in the level of assurance of supply, back up to the 1 in 50, and as augmentation and new strategy around water rights allocation come on line, that level of assurance of supply can increase even further.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Dr Rolfe Eberhard
Independent public policy advisor

Dr Gisela Kaiser
Previously Executive Director: Informal Settlements, Water and Waste, City of Cape Town

Alderman Ian Neilson
Deputy Mayor: City of Cape Town

Mike Mulcahy
CEO: GreenCape

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Councillor Xanthea Limberg
Mayoral Committee member: Informal Settlements, Water & Waste Services and Energy, CoCT

Peter Flower
Recently retired Director: Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town

Dr Lloyd Fisher-Jeffes
Water resources engineer: Aurecon

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• The Cape Town water crisis highlighted weaknesses in the water governance system in South Africa
• The governance system is fragmented – with mandates and responsibilities located at different levels of the system and between the spheres of government, national, provincial and local – and characterised by poor coordination and large degrees of mistrust
• Mandates and responsibilities of the three spheres of government not joined together into a coherent decision making, planning and budgeting system lead to incoherent decisions that undermine water security
• In some cases there are hard boundaries in the governance framework that result in lost opportunities to increase the overall systems level of supply; an example is the clearing of alien vegetation in catchment areas by the City of Cape Town, that would be a more cost-effective option than building a desalination plant, but the City cannot do this because it falls outside its area and outside its mandate
• Capacity and capability is a key issue – the question whether all the authorities have the capacity to execute their mandates
• In particular, the national Department of Water and Sanitation has suffered skills losses and a depletion of capacity over a number of years, and is malfunctioning - with severe detrimental consequences for water governance
• During the crisis, the city government lost confidence in the system’s ability to reliably supply water to it, and asserted certain responsibilities and duties not in the strict conduct of City business, such as augmenting supply
• With the weaknesses in the water governance system thrown into stark relief by the crisis, the conclusion has become unavoidable that the current governance framework is inappropriate and that a considerable amount of work needs to be done to improve governance
• The way that water is governed and managed in South Africa has to fundamentally change in the future
• In particular, a more direct role for cities in their own water supply and planning is called for; against the backdrop of massive inequality and social deprivation, cities are engines of growth that have to be able to function optimally, which they can do only with a reliable, sustainable supply of resources, including water; managing and planning for water cannot take place exclusively at a national level

00:00:05
Hooks:

• Sitting under hydrological crisis was a governance crisis which exacerbated the drought, and brought us far closer to Day Zero than we needed to be in the first place (AB)
• Current governance framework around water is inappropriate (MM)
• The way water is governed and managed in South Africa has to fundamentally change in the future (CK)

00:00:59
SHORTCOMINGS OF CURRENT GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK

• Fragmented system from a governance point of view; not joined up; mismatch between natural and institutional governance systems
• Not well coordinated; large degree of mistrust in the relationships
• Issues of capacity and capability: question whether all of the authorities have the capabilities to execute their mandates
• Even after crisis we still persist with separate or parallel planning, rather than joined-up or integrated planning (AB)
• SA’s constitutional dispensation built on notion of cooperative government between spheres of government; but if critical skills lost at national level, cooperative governance is weakened dramatically: imbalance of forces and quickly becomes a blame game (CK)
• Hard boundaries in current governance framework sometimes results in opportunities to increase overall systems level of supply being lost; example: clearing of alien vegetation in catchment areas by the City would be a more cost-effective option than building a desalination plant, but the City cannot do this because it falls outside its area and outside its mandate (MM)

00:09:53
NATIONAL DEPARTMENT DYSFUNCTIONAL; CITY STEPPED IN

• National Department of Water and Sanitation plagued by many issues, including depletion of skills; malfunctioning (CK, MN, KW)
• During the crisis, the City lost confidence in system’s ability to reliably supply water to it, and asserted certain responsibilities and duties not in strict conduct of City business, such as augmenting supply (CK)

00:18:02
CURRENT WATER GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK INAPPROPRIATE AND HAS TO CHANGE FUNDAMENTALLY

• Unavoidable conclusion that governance framework around water in SA is inappropriate; considerable amount of work to be done to improve governance (MM)
• Way water is governed and managed in SA has to fundamentally change; more direct role for cities in water supply and planning, as cities are drivers of growth, and they need to be resource secure (CK)

00:00:59
"I see a fragmented system from a governance point of view – mandates and responsibilities sit at different levels of the system. And the problem about institutional mandates is that they stop people from seeing the system as a whole; they only see their part of the system. And I think that the more we went into it we saw that the system is, has been, and I think still is, poorly governed, from a decision making and planning point of view. So I would be so bold as to say, yes, we had a hydrological crisis, but sitting under that was a governance crisis which exacerbated the drought, and brought us far closer to Day Zero than we needed to be in the first place.”

"A large chunk of the mandate sits with the national Department of Water and Sanitation, and part of looking at the issues in the system is whether all the authorities have the capabilities of executing their mandates. So capacity and capability is part of the equation.” Other parts of the mandate sit with provincial and local governments. "So if it’s not well coordinated, and if the relationships in the system are not strong, then you’re going to have poor results. And what I see is a system with a large degree of mistrust in the relationships, mistrust between for example the urban sector water users and the agricultural users, not much consideration given to the environmental use of the system, and certainly not much cooperation from an intergovernmental point of view between the national, provincial and local spheres of government. And all that conspires or adds up to produce a system that is not well governed. And there’s a mismatch between the natural system and the boundaries of that natural system and the institutional governance system. There’s a whole lot of different authorities, from national to provincial to local, that have different responsibilities for different parts of the system, and that’s not joined up.”

00:03:36
"The resource management for the region needs to be far better done … What needs to be done is to ensure that the management is done effectively of the system in terms of the rules that were established for that system to run effectively. And that’s very important, I think; it’s key that that had a really damaging effect, going into, certainly at the start, and then through the earlier portions of the drought, so it’s really important that one doesn’t allow that to happen again.”

00:04:36
"It concerns me that even after the drought and the crisis that hit us, which raised awareness about these sorts of things, that we tend to still persist in separate or parallel planning for the future of the system, rather than joined-up and integrated planning. If we don’t have a way to ensure that the mandates and responsibilities of all three spheres of government are joined together into a coherent decision making, planning, budgeting system, we are going to continue to get incoherent decisions, which will not sustain the water supply in this region.”

00:05:27
"South Africa is built in our constitutional dispensation on the notion of cooperative government between different spheres of government, and so the relationship for the provision of water is really one where the majority of the City’s responsibility is to provide the distribution of the water in and out of the system and the supply comes from national water department with its regional or provincial offices through a system of dams and other schemes around the province. But if that department, as it did, lost some critical skills and abilities over a period of years, then it means that the system of cooperative governance is weakened dramatically – not least because there is an imbalance of forces in how it is supposed to work or is designed to work, but also because it so quickly can become a blame game, as it did in certain phases of the drought … That kind of standing in a circle firing line is not very helpful in a crisis. But it is understandable because each sphere of government is a massive institution, filled with complexities, and the cooperative governance space essentially means you take three massively complex empires and then smash them together, and see what emerges, and I think that is why the City took the approach that if we’re going to get out of this mess, we have to assert certain responsibilities and duties that perhaps were not in the strict conduct of City business, such as augmenting supply. It was not in the nature of our business to provide sources of supply to the network, and it has been said that some of our planning around this was mistaken.”

00:08:27
Current governance framework puts users in competition, and some of the opportunities available to users to increase overall systems level of supply fall outside their mandate. Example: City of Cape Town could invest in invasive alien clearing in catchments, which would dramatically increase overall system yield, but because it falls outside its mandate and outside its area, it is currently not able to do so, which would be much more cost-effective than for example building desalination plants. "These hard boundaries that have been set up within the water supply system and water supply network mean that there are a handful of inefficiencies that could unlock a great deal of opportunity and a great deal of value for all of the users if there could be an opportunity for those users to cooperate and collaborate to optimise the system use. From the City’s perspective, it means that you end up looking after your own interests in designing an augmentation strategy rather than working with all of the system users in designing a system strategy.”

00:09:53
"South Africa is very lucky to have very progressive water legislation that was adopted in the late 1990s, I think some exceptional leadership in Water Affairs at the end of the 1990s. But a few of those individuals, one or two of them, remain. But really it is a story of a depletion of capacity of the national department over some years.”

00:10:33
"In the Western Cape my feeling is that we’re very dependent on the national department to actually be good at what it does, and we’ve had, I think, a bit of a problem over the last several years, where the national Department of Water and Sanitation has essentially been malfunctioning – I don’t think it’s a secret about that, you can see some of the parliamentary portfolio committee discussions, so when you’re dependent on a malfunctioning national department to be doing strategic water supply planning, then you could see that that could be a big contributory factor to the kind of crisis we’ve had right now. So I’m not sure what the answer is, but there are other models out there about how a water system could be managed and one of the questions you might want to be asking is, is a state-owned enterprise actually a better way of doing it than this kind of very complex set of actors that we have in the Western Cape.”

00:11:39
Tentative and what looked like a difficult relationship between City of Cape Town and national minister and Department of Water and Sanitation during the crisis. "I think it got the City officials extremely nervous that the national department was seemingly not cooperating and they were unable to understand why that was not the case.” Sinister suggestion that party politics had a role in this. "And eventually it became very clear that there were plenty of other issues within the Department of Water and Sanitation at a national level. The department for instance has had to spend a good deal of its budget over the last five years on virtually every other province engaged in a water drought and a water crisis. And so a lot of the money had been spent, there were also accusations of corruption, and a lot of the budget had been spent on corrupt practices and had been lastly pretty inept in responding to some of these crises and the long-term planning that it is responsible for trying to achieve. So those three things I think were limitations into the speed with which the department could respond. The City I think felt that it was being unsupported by a national state department, and increasingly had to start to make its own decisions, to go it alone, as far as possible.”

00:14:15
"I think that the problem is, when you’re confronted with a system that you don’t think will be able to supply water for you, what do you do? The contours of the Western Cape are unique, in such a way that there was no easy way to supply us with water from other parts of the country. And really what it came to at one stage was, in this complicated cooperative governance space, we had the option of trying to stick to what could be interpreted as our strict mandates, and then possibly running out of water, but being able to say at the end of it, well we stuck to the mandates – no-one would have cared. Or providing that water and facing the possibility of future legal challenge or fines from the responsible national departments. And the risk factor was in favour of the latter, really.”

00:15:25
"We also need to be increasingly independent in the long run. Waiting for dysfunctional state departments to try to direct and lead the city’s water management, doesn’t make a lot of sense in the long term. The City of Cape Town is going to have to manage the risk in terms of ensuring greater water security, and it will have to do this increasingly on its own. The message, I think, is becoming increasingly independent. You cannot wait for a state department that is dysfunctional, that lacks leadership, that has a budget that’s long since spent, where there is elements of corruption which seems to have drawn this department into all kinds of shenanigans, that are making it really difficult to take the lead. And so the concept is: cities lead, national governments will follow. We need strong examples from cities that are able to react to local conditions, local climatic change and weather variability far faster than a national state department that seems to have fallen asleep and left the country behind.”

00:16:36
"This is perhaps where the picture of government in South Africa is somewhat beneficial because what we also have as a result of our dispensation in the late 1990s are strong metropolitan governments, which have many flaws but many strengths, one of which is the ability to marshal resources, to marshal effort, and to direct it in executing mega-projects.”

00:17:08
"Part of the challenge for the City in investing in diversified supplies of water is, many people would question whether that is the City’s mandate or whether that’s national government’s mandate. And by the City investing in those projects, the City is paying for them, and the City has to recover those expenses from its own ratepayers. The further challenge is the concern that City gets given a certain allocation of water from the Western Cape water supply system and national government determines what that allocation is, and the fear is that as City starts funding and bringing on line its own diversified water sources, that their allocation could be reduced by national Department of Water and Sanitation. So it really starts playing in that space as to what role should City be playing and what role should national government be playing, and how do they collectively look at what’s good for the system.”

00:18:02
"I think in the reflection and the analysis of the moving parts of the drought, I think there’s an unavoidable conclusion that the current governance framework established around water is inappropriate, and that there is a considerable amount of work that needs to be done in the South African context and here in the Western Cape context to improve the governance in that system. There are a handful of potential solutions to do that, but it really does become incumbent on the users of the system to take a little bit more responsibility for the whole of the system rather than their just individual interests within that system.”

00:18:46
"The way water is governed and managed in South Africa has to fundamentally change in the future. I think that the, if you look at our approach now as the City of Cape Town, we are planning the rollout of these augmentation schemes that we devised in the Water Resilience Task Team. They will happen. And they will happen at the behest of the city government, because the city must be resource secure. Cities are drivers of growth, they are anchors of regions, in any part of the world, but especially here in South Africa where we have such massive inequality and social deprivation, our engines of growth have to be able to function. They need resources to function, they need water, they need electricity, otherwise they won’t survive. And the provision of those resources has to be sustainable. I think that the mechanisms of distribution of those resources – water, energy – that were informed by logics that are twenty or thirty years out of date now have been belied by the facts, and by what has come to pass. And I don’t see any future for water management in a country where cities don’t take a more direct role in what it means to have a sustainable, reliable supply. Cape Town, Johannesburg, any major city, is dynamic, it is large, it is complicated, it needs to be able to think about and plan for its resources in the future. It cannot do that if it has a part-time partner in the form of a national department that is thinking – justifiably – about the national system as a whole, but not necessarily about the particular needs of a city and the region surrounding the city. And so, yes, I certainly think that there must be a change in our approach to the governance structures, to supply systems, and ultimately to distribution systems. And our relationship with water as a whole. And I think that the city government, the City of Cape Town, has been a great driver of that behaviour change. The national Department of Water, yes, it has the right messages about saving water and the importance of water, but it’s the City that is charging for water, that’s on the frontlines of the taxation relationship with its consumers and residents and citizens. The City is driving, ultimately, what the nature of our relationship with water is and should be, and it has mechanisms at its disposal such as planning authorities, urban redesign, thinking about stormwater, that views or takes into consideration the water system as a whole. And managing the water system in a place, with all of those different mechanisms, cannot take place exclusively at the national level.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Andrew Boraine
CEO: Western Cape Economic Development Partnership

Mike Mulcahy
CEO: GreenCape

Craig Kesson
Chief Resilience Officer: City of Cape Town

Peter Flower
Recently retired Director: Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town

Prof Mark New
Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate Change: University of Cape Town

Dr Kevin Winter
Senior lecturer: Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape Government

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• Experience during the Cape Town water crisis demonstrated the value and importance of transparency, collaboration and partnerships
• There was a change in the City of Cape Town’s approach in the course of the crisis, from “we’ll sort this out” to “we’re all in this together” – this acknowledgement that survival required collaboration, cooperation, and the pooling of resources delivered better results
• Early in the crisis the City decided to start putting much more information out into the public realm, and that made a big difference; scientists could work with this information and share it, encouraging debate on the basis of facts and evidence, rather than mistrust and suspicion; intermediary organisations could translate the information and make it accessible for businesses and citizens
• The lesson that was learnt was to be very transparent right from the start, and to combine this transparency with an open call to partner
• The crisis demonstrated the importance of the different spheres of government – local, provincial, national – working together, and the different users of the water system – municipalities and agriculture – working together
• Pulling together collaborative groups also worked in the business sector: across industry, between competitors, with government, with civil society, stakeholders came together to put their heads together to think around the common issue, align thinking, and coordinate action
• In dealing with citizens, officials in city management can tap into people’s intuitive understanding of the difficulties of managing, experienced in the day-to-day challenges and constraints of personal budgets or family circumstances
• The transfer of water from Groenland / Eikenhof at the height of the crisis was made possible by longstanding personal relationships
• City Bulk Water department had very close working relationship with national Department of Water and Sanitation during the drought
• Engineering advisory firm Aurecon supported the City during the drought; having a solid team inside the company that worked together well was critical
• In disaster management, large numbers of people from a range of disciplines and organisations were pulled together to coordinate activity and develop a coherent plan

00:00:05
Hooks:

• One of the things that has emerged is the importance of partnerships (GZ)
• Being very transparent with all stakeholders right from the start (HD)
• You need to be pulling the various stakeholders together to make a difference when these kind of large issues face you (FK)

00:00:48
PRINCIPLES

• The importance of collaboration and partnerships
• Change in City’s approach over the course of the crisis, from "we’ll sort this out” to "we’re all in this together” (CP)
• Hierarchical view of the world + spin = the opposite of what citizens need; quite soon City decided to put much more information in public realm; this made a big difference (AB)
• Importance of partnerships and working together: across spheres of government, and between different users in the system (GZ)
• The power of collaboration: across industry, between competitors, with government, with civil society; not only in a crisis, but also before there is a crisis (FK)
• Being very transparent with all stakeholders right from the start; transparency and an open call to partner; set those partnerships and relationships up before the crisis (HD)
• As a city manager, you need to find ways to work with the people that you are servicing; be visible, be open to learning, be open-minded; tap into people’s own understanding of the difficulty of managing; acknowledge that you need other people in doing this work (TL)
• Advantages of being transparent outweigh disadvantages; journalists and scientists can work with information and help disseminate it (NG)

00:08:07
FOUR EXAMPLES

• City Bulk Water department had very close working relationship with national Department of Water and Sanitation during the drought (BW)
• The transfer of water from Groenland / Eikenhof at the height of the crisis was made possible by longstanding personal relationships (GZ)
• Having a solid team that worked together well was critical in the support that Aurecon was able to give the City during the drought (LFJ)
• In disaster management, large numbers of people from a range of disciplines and organisations were pulled together to coordinate activity and develop a coherent plan (CD)

00:00:48
"I think the other thing that we really learnt from the crisis is the importance of collaboration and partnerships. I think in the early parts of the crisis, you know, the City of Cape Town was kind of saying to the citizens, don’t worry, we’ve got this, right, we’ll sort you guys out, you play your part, but don’t worry, we’ll sort this out, we’ll build enough new supply to survive. I think when the realisation and the acknowledgement came from the City that actually we were all in this together, and everyone had to play a role, otherwise we weren’t going to survive, and that for that to happen everyone had to collaborate, to pool their resources, they had to try and figure it out, because actually the City didn’t have the answers, nor did any other government sphere, it was everyone within the City and outside that had to try and help contribute to the solutions to get out of the crisis.”

00:01:42
"Some people in big municipal institutions – not just the City of Cape Town, but it happens around South Africa, around the world – tend to take quite a hierarchical view of the world: we’re elected, we’re in charge, we’ll tell you what to do. And people react badly to that sort of behaviour, that sort of attitude. It’s not a question of, well, this is a whole of society approach, we all have our bit to do, the public sector will do this, citizens need to do this, businesses need to do that, civil society, academia. If you start off by saying, we’re in charge, we know what to do, don’t worry, that is a very poor starting point for communicating and having your communications well received.”

"And the other thing I, you know, a lot of what institutions of governance or government tend to do is that they are constantly trying to filter or spin the information, trying to put on the best side. When actually what citizens need, what businesses need, is the full picture, in a transparent way. And I think that what did happen quite soon is that the City did decide, took a decision to start putting much more information out into the public realm, and that made a big difference. Scientists could look at it and say they agreed or disagreed, but it encouraged debate, on the basis of facts and information and evidence, rather than suspicion and mistrust and fake news, and citizens, because groups like WWF started taking this information, or GreenCape started taking this information, and translating it into more accessible documentation, for businesses and for citizens that immediately empowered people to stop reacting as atomised individuals and start working together through citizen action, business action, to cooperate with the public authorities and to start turning the crisis around.”

00:04:11
"So one of the things that has emerged is the importance of partnerships, that you have to work together, different partners need to be involved in the responses, you need to work across spheres of government, the City needs to work with provincial government, who needs to work with national government, but there are also other actors in the system, whether it’s farmers, whether it’s other landowners, and they all need to find a way to collaborate.”

00:04:32
"The power of collaboration. And across industry, between competitors, with government, with civil society, so when everybody came together to put their heads together to think around a common issue, I think the ability to – we couldn’t influence the availability of water, but we could influence the planning around what to do. You need to be pulling the various stakeholders together to make a difference when these kind of large issues face you. But also I think it’s about forward planning, and sometimes it’s, can we, we get so caught up in the day to day that we don’t have time to do these kind of things, but it might be better to pull these kind of collaborative groups earlier and have broader engagements so that you don’t do it when you have to do it, you can forecast it happening and try to avoid having to go out there and say, people, there’s going to be Day Zero and you’re going to have to stand in a queue for water.”

00:05:28
"Being very transparent with all stakeholders right from the start; I think being open what City can control and what it has no control over; so I think something like rainfall is acknowledging how important rainfall is in terms of the water supply system. And that how much it rains is beyond the City’s control. So I think that transparency, and then linked with that transparency is an open call to partner. And so for me the lesson learnt there is for us not to wait until another crisis is imminent before we look to build partnerships, but to look right now at how to set up ongoing partnerships with business, with civil society, so that as something starts becoming more pressing and potentially a crisis that we have those partnerships and relationships of trust built up.”

00:06:19
"You need to work with the people. You know, you need to find ways of how then do you work with the people that you are servicing. You need to be visible, you need to be out there, you need to be open to learning, you need to be open-minded, you know, so for me that’s critical. And also be meaningful, when you’re doing those participations, or those engagements with communities, do say when you are struggling, do say when this is not feasible, you know, people do have their own budgets at their households, you know, people do have children that they’re also managing, you know, they know the difficulties of managing, I think tap into what people are already doing, people have stokvels, you know, people are already having things that they know that difficult, you know, people are not expecting the City to do or the city manager to come up with the solutions, you know, some solutions are there with the people on the ground or those communities. I think for me it’s firstly acknowledging that, that you are also a human being as much as you are a city manager, that you also need other people to assist you to do this work.”

00:7:23
"When a city plays open cards, when it’s transparent, when it provides information to its citizens, to its residents, to the scientists in the city, not necessarily those just working for the City, but at universities, it’s likely to be beneficial, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. And so by being open there are a lot of other people who could come, like GroundUp, like the UCT scientists, who could use that information that the City provided, and inform other residents, so the knowledge disseminated. That was a much better approach than holding back information.”

00:08:07
"The other area that, you know, needs to be carefully worked through in these kind of scenarios is relationships with your stakeholders and other partners in the water supply system. We do abstract most of our water from dams owned and operated by the national Department of Water and Sanitation. We had during the crisis a very close working relationship with them in terms of where we were drawing our water, and there were regular drought meetings which they convened, with all the different role-players from ourselves as the City of Cape Town, but also the other municipalities surrounding us, as well as agriculture and the different irrigation boards.”

"So it is important to build trust across the different stakeholders in your system, and that you work together. You cannot fight with one another while you’re facing a crisis.”

"And then on the provincial government side they were really providing a lot of support around the disaster response, and trying to facilitate that not only in the city of Cape Town, but also in the surrounding areas, because their mandate obviously extends beyond where the City of Cape Town operates.”

"So, you know, my experience is that, you know, you’ve just got to try and work together and have a common purpose and try and overcome the obstacles that a crisis might throw at you.”

00:09:49
"One of the ways that the City got additional water into the system in the early months of 2018 was through a transfer of water from Eikenhof dam and the Groenland farmers. And what’s interesting about this story is it’s really about long-term relationships. And so one of the officials from the Department of Water and Sanitation who’s worked in the Western Cape for thirty years was speaking to these farmers and they said, but we’ve got water in our dams, why should we have to have 60% restrictions? And he said, that’s fine, but are you able to transfer some of this water to the City of Cape Town’s water supply system? And they said, OK, we can do that. They didn’t get paid for it, they ceded the water, so they gave it to the City of Cape Town, so that they didn’t have to be as heavily restricted. Importantly, the Department of Water and Sanitation had to pay Eskom, the power providers, to pump the water into the Western Cape system, and then the City of Cape Town paid the Department of Water for that electricity, and effectively for the water.”

"And one of the stories around this is about how this agreement happened. So instead of signing a formal agreement, the person from the Department of Water and Sanitation who’d known these people for decades, did it on a handshake, and really trusted them and said, will you go through with this, and they said, yes, we will. So that’s a wonderful story about how personal relations are important, understanding the system, where water is, how things work, and using the current regulatory system to enable it.”

00:11:25
"I’ve been fortunate to experience different aspects of the drought, and I think one of the key ones that affected a number of places was the value of having teams that, and the personal relationships in those teams. So whether it was the personal relationship between City officials and Water Affairs officials to facilitate things happening, or personal relationships and having a solid team that you can rely on back at Aurecon, where we had people working in the Tshwane office, with teams down here but we all collaborated and, you know, you brought in expertise from a range of things, so we had experienced planners, experienced hydrologists, engineers, everything coming together to work that. I don’t think our support of the City could have been possible without that team, I don’t think anyone holds all the knowledge and I think the City also recognised that, with things like the section 80 committee, where they brought in others, that for me at least, that was one important learning, is that the team, that having a solid team that works together well is critical for getting through.”

"I think if I ever have to be in a similar situation, in terms of another city, hopefully not Cape Town, it would be that they need to get their message out there as quickly as possible, as clearly as possible, and also share what they’re doing. I think as a sector often we provide water or we do this work, but a lot of what goes, happens in the background, never gets to the fore, and I think a lot of people who deserve a lot of recognition from the City and from Water Affairs and from other stakeholders that had been involved – agriculture – will never get that recognition, because, well, we don’t recognise them, and I think that’s part of where the, could be a good way of solving some of the unhappiness in that you only really realise how much people are doing for you and that you can’t really be unhappy, unless you know what they’re doing. So, I mean I definitely learned that in my experience, and I think many Capetonians would be quite shocked at how hard people from private sector, public, government at all levels, have worked to get through this drought. And that doesn’t diminish the role that all those individuals played in terms of getting through the drought – without the citizens’ reaction in reducing at fifty percent, or their demand hugely, it wasn’t quite fifty, but reducing their demand hugely, we wouldn’t have got through the drought, but equally so without all the work that was done by various in essence small number of people in various stages of government, we wouldn’t have got through, so I think getting the message out there also helps build a bit of a team spirit, like, we know what you’re going through, or thank you sort of vibe, sort of idea, you know, like thank you, you can show appreciation and understand what others are going through. I think I would definitely encourage people to do that more.”

00:14:56
"The strong thing about disaster management is the kind of relationships you build up. So for example, you know, what we learnt in the drought in 2010, a lot of the people we met there, especially on the agricultural side, were people we could rely on again. Building relationships is extremely important. You had, for example with the Knysna fires, we built a field hospital; now we had health issues with the drought, you had the same people that you are calling to your meetings. The other nice thing about, or good thing about disaster management is you don’t just have to work with the people within your government – you can bring in national government, you can bring in NGOs, you can bring in agricultural forums, you know, so whoever you need, and even specialists, private specialists, everybody becomes part of that command system that you develop for a major incident, and everybody then has a role to play. And I think that was what was important for us, so it wasn’t oversight as much as it was coordination. And that was really the important thing. Everybody must know what the other one is doing, and when that starts happening then you really break down the silos and everybody can sort of pull in the same direction.”

"The advantage of us activating our disaster management centre under the provincial declaration allowed us to bring in all those different organisations, whether they were government departments, whether they were NGOs, whether they were representatives of organised agriculture, you know, whoever it was, volunteers, experts, those are the people that we could bring in and we could have access to on a daily basis, so at one stage we had them there every day, and then the idea having everybody in the disaster centre every day, it was late in 2017, was that they could have their plans done. And while you’ve got one component like health for example planning, just across the table from them you have the humanitarian people, so they could immediately interact, and we wanted to walk out of there with the plans in place. It took a month. We got all that in place. Then we had everybody there three days a week, and then we had them there twice a week. And so we carried on and as we got through the summer and that included almost eighty different organisations, and it depended on the amount of representation you had, so all the provincial departments were there, large number of national departments, your security services, the police, the defence force, state security, they were all there. And everybody was looking at their specific component of the situation, and they would then come in and they would contribute, you know, to the larger picture, and that way we could keep our hand on pretty much everything that was happening.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Assoc Prof Gina Ziervogel
Research chair: African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape Government

Feroz Koor
Group head of sustainability: Woolworths

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Andrew Boraine
CEO: Western Cape Economic Development Partnership

Thabo Lusithi
Western Cape Water Caucus coordinator: Environmental Monitoring Group

Nathan Geffen
Founder: GroundUp

Barry Wood
Manager: Bulk water, City of Cape Town

Dr Lloyd Fisher-Jeffes
Water resources engineer: Aurecon

Colin Deiner
Chief Director: Disaster Management, Western Cape government

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• The agriculture and agribusiness sectors in the Western Cape were hard hit by the drought and the water crisis
• Agriculture saw the crisis building up from the production year 2014/15 to early 2018 when it hit rock bottom
• Low rainfall resulted in both low dam levels on farms and reduced allocation from dams managed by the national Department of Water and Sanitation
• Early in 2018 agriculture reached its Day Zero: no more water was released to it from dams managed by national department
• The loss in the 2017/18 production year in the Western Cape agricultural sector due to the drought is estimated at around R5bn
• In addition, there is also longer-term damage to orchards and vineyards: poor irrigation in one season affects fruit trees and reduces yields also in subsequent years; in some instances where insufficient water was available for the whole farm parts of orchards and vineyards were not irrigated at all and left to die; this resulted in much higher annual replacement rates than the normal 5%; farmer’s investment was damaged, and cashflow in subsequent years affected
• Around 30,000 agricultural jobs were lost, mainly seasonal workers who rely on this income during a part of the year for survival throughout the year
• Furthermore, the Day Zero messaging had a negative effect on agricultural export markets, with doubts arising with overseas buyers whether suppliers will be able to meet commitments; when shelf space is lost with a retailer it is very difficult to get it back; this contributes to long-term impact from the drought
• The agriprocessing industry tends to be very water intensive, and found it difficult to reduce water use; it was heavily impacted by the drought, with production hours and production lines cut in many instances
• During the crisis, with the focus in the city on the urban situation, the conversation around what was happening on the farms was lost to some extent; even worse, there was a degree of polarisation between urban and agricultural needs
• The question after the crisis is how to start integrating the agricultural and urban use of water, how to get a dialogue going between the two sectors, and how to foster cooperation on their common interests

00:00:05
Hooks:

• The farmers sacrificed first (CO)
• The sluice gates of the dams were closed and no more water was released for the farmers (AR)
• The farmers’ livelihood was jeopardised with their Day Zero (CO)

00:00:50
INTRODUCTION: CITY AND AGRICULTURE

• Conversation around what was happening on the farms during the drought period was lost in the urban debate
• Separation and polarisation between urban and agricultural needs (KW)

00:02:09
IMPACT ON AGRICULTURE

• Crisis built up over a number of production years, getting to rock bottom by 2018
• Low rainfall resulted in both low dam levels on farms and reduction in allocation from dams managed by national Department of Water and Sanitation
• Early in 2018 agriculture reached its Day Zero: no more water released to it from dams managed by national department
• Loss in 2017/18 production year in Western Cape agricultural sector due to drought estimated at around R5bn
• Longer-term damage as well: fruit trees are affected in subsequent years by poor irrigation in one season; in some instances where insufficient water was available for whole farm parts of orchards and vineyards were not irrigated at all and left to die; higher replacement rate, with detrimental impact on return on investment and cashflow
• 30,000 jobs were lost, mainly seasonal workers
• Day Zero messaging also had detrimental impact on export market
• Agriprocessing sector also very hard hit (CO, AR, HD)

00:16:32
PROPOSALS FOR DIFFERENT APPROACH TO URBAN / AGRICULTURE RELATIONSHIP AFTER THE CRISIS

• Question after the crisis: how do we start to integrate agricultural and urban use of water? How do we get a dialogue going between the sectors, and foster cooperation between the two on their common interests? (KW, AB)

00:19:17
CLOSE: SUFFERING AND HARDSHIP ON FARMS DURING DROUGHT – BECAUSE WE HAVEN’T LEARNT TO MANAGE OUR RESOURCES

• Tremendous suffering and hardship on farms should serve as a warning to us to learn to manage our resources (CO)

00:00:50
"So one of the areas I think that caused a conflict, at least in conversation, is our separation during the water crisis right now, is the separation in our discourse between urban requirements for the city of Cape Town and the requirements for the agricultural sector. And it almost felt like a lot of these conversations were polarised, that the allocation for the city was completely independent from what was happening just outside of the city, of farmers who were struggling in the drought to try to continue to keep their farms productive, to keep farm workers on their farms and to try and be responsible at the same time for the amount of water that they were using. And it’s a tough task, and I think the conversation around what farmers were doing, what they experienced, was lost in the whole urban debate, and we were highly focused obviously as a city on our urban, and neglected to some extent to hear the stories and how in fact there could have been a much stronger, improved relationship between the city of Cape Town and the agricultural sector.”

00:02:09
Agriculture saw the crisis building up every production year from 2014/15 through to 2017/18, with lower rainfall each year negatively affecting dam levels both on farms and those managed nationally, getting to rock bottom by 2018. "The crisis that I saw was happening was that we’ve realised it in the province, we’ve realised it in disaster management, cabinet level we’ve realised it, department of Water Affairs did not realise it. Locally: yes; nationally: no.”

Water Act sets out priority ranking for water use: first human beings and animals, then environment and agriculture. During drought periods, not only do the dams on farms dry up, but at the same time the allocation to agriculture from dams managed by the national Department of Water and Sanitation is reduced. This was the situation that agriculture had to manage.

Post-harvest irrigation required for horticulture and vineyards, with fertilisers and nourishment; then in springtime pre-harvest watering needed. In past three hydrological years, tremendous heat, with higher need for water. With empty farm dams, farmers were reliant on allocation from nationally managed dams. "Knowing that we’re getting this big cut [in allocation] that’s coming in November 2017, there was a request for to borrow on that, just to take this crop through. And if you go and look at those graphs you will see that the drawdown was quite heavy on the basis of what the normal planning allocation was. That’s when we knew that we’re going to hit, on that system, we’re going to hit Day Zero end of January, first week of February [2018]. Then the water was cut.”

00:06:40
58 million cubic metres allocated to agriculture, and when it was used, agriculture reached its Day Zero. Severe consequences for agriculture. Impact of the drought on agriculture in Western Cape amounted to a R4.9 billion loss. Average production down by about 20%. One of the most serious impacts was that about 30,000 people, mostly seasonal workers, lost their jobs. Devastating impact for the affected people.

00:08:19
Effect of the drought is only going to run out in the next three to four years, so the impact of around R5bn can escalate, depending on what happens in subsequent years. Also fiscal implications, due to loss of tax income, as well as loss of revenue from water not sold.

00:09:55
There is a saying that a fruit tree does not forget when it is treated badly; insufficient irrigation does longer-term damage to a tree’s yields: quality, quantity and size of fruit. If export size requirements not met, then sold locally or to canning, with much lower revenue. Very challenging situation for farmers. Normal replacement programme for vineyards around 5% per annum; drought has resulted in a higher rate, closer to 10% or 15% that had to be replanted. In some cases, faced with a situation of insufficient water for the whole farm, farmers had to take decision to leave parts of farm without water, leaving those fruit trees or vineyards to die. Serious impact on following year’s harvest and cashflow.

00:12:42
Farmers reporting drop in yields of between 5% and 15% in wine grapes, attributed directly to lack of post-harvest irrigation in previous season.

00:13:05
"We started making plans for how we’re going to manage this. But unfortunately the way that Day Zero was used must also be very carefully handled in the future.” While farmers were making innovative plans to still deliver despite the drought, the implicit message of Day Zero to export market was that producers did not have enough water to deliver promised output. This unintended consequence had a damaging impact on the overseas market: "They get the message: it’s dry, production is not getting the water, and with that situation that’s coming through, they say: are you still going to source us? Must we look for sourcing somewhere else? So the message that you send out you’ve got to manage.”

00:14:23
Not only drop in volume of sales that is detrimental, also loss of shelf space with retailers in overseas markets; very difficult to get back once lost.

00:14:43
Agriprocessing sector very water intensive, and one of the hardest hit during the drought. Water used either in the product itself or in the making of the product – as a result found it fairly hard to reduce water use substantially. Includes bread manufacturers, fruit and vegetable processing, dairy and meat industries, beverage industries. Many ended up having to cut production hours or production lines. Also impact on agriprocessing from reduced quantity and quality of agricultural output.

00:16:09
Exporters of canned fruit to China and Japan were unable to meet contractual obligations.

00:16:32
"During the crisis the conversation about urban water was often independent of the agricultural sector just outside of the city. And so I think the thought here is, how do we start to integrate agricultural use of water and the urban water, given that we’re in the same region. How do we become more able to relate to the lives of people who are working in the agricultural sector, involved in production, and also share the same resources as the city. I think that conversation was missing.”

00:17:13
"Getting a bit of a dialogue going between agricultural sector and the urban sector, because they may have competing interests, and they often have different interests, you know, agriculture uses water intensively in the summer months, and less so, depending on the commodity that we’re talking about, in the winter months. Whereas it’s more even across the spectrum for the urban sector water users. So they are different interests at different times of the year, which make it difficult, but to start talking about where are their common interests, is there a common agenda between agriculture as a 30 percent user of the system and the urban sector is the 70 percent user of the system. Do they have a common approach to engaging with national government? Who in national government can we talk to? If the department doesn’t want to talk, or is incapable of talking, who else in national government can we talk to, you know, is it Treasury? There are ways to start the conversation.”

00:18:20
"So how do we think differently now around how we share water from the same dams with farmers? Wouldn’t it make more sense if we started to become increasingly independent and / or at least use less water from those storage dams so that we could literally give back to the farmers, and to see agricultural production as a very important part of the symbiotic relationship, this important interrelationship that we have with the agricultural sector and the city. And that discussion I think was lost in a lot of the crisis management, let’s look for new sources of water, let’s try and use our allocation obviously wisely, but we lost the actual pain that many of these agricultural industries and agri-industries were suffering.”

00:19:17
"The farmers sacrificed first. Then we started seeing sacrificing on the consumers’ side, in the cities, but not to the extent that their livelihoods was jeopardised. The farmers’ livelihood was jeopardised with their Day Zero.”

Tremendous hardship and suffering on farms during the drought, and extensive support was required.

"I know of farms where they’ve said to me when we go there they can’t offer you tea, because they haven’t got it. That is because we haven’t learnt to manage our resources, and we better get around it asap, or we all are going to sit in that situation.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Carl Opperman
CEO: Agri Wes Cape

André Roux
Director: Sustainable Resource Management, Western Cape government

Dr Kevin Winter
Senior lecturer: Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape Government

Andrew Boraine
CEO: Western Cape Economic Development Partnership

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• The Cape Town water crisis played out against the backdrop of party-political battles, which in some instances affected government decisions and actions
• Politics makes it much more difficult to achieve anything: when people are fighting and are trying to win political points, they are not going to be aligned on their messaging, and when they’re not aligned on their messaging, they lose credibility
• Politicking confuses, delays, complicates, and leads to point-scoring; the water crisis was to some extent used as a political pawn by parties to show either how good they were or how bad their opponents were
• Politics initially prevented the release of some information as there was concern about exposing the severity of the situation; when politics died down a bit and engineers could come forward with the facts, things improved
• Business has no real regard for or interest in politics, for which person or what entity was responsible for the situation or for failures; business just needs the facts, needs to know what government is doing, so that it can decide its own actions
• All spheres of government – local, provincial and national – must get together, set their politics aside and focus on the solutions; the different users – various municipalities and agriculture – must do the same
• The technical people should recognise and push back against attempts by politicians to promote solutions that have political advantages for the politicians, as opposed to technically sound, engineered solutions
• The normal rules of political interaction need to be suspended during crisis periods in order to have a coherent response, where resources are coordinated to point in the same direction to respond to the crisis
• You need clear mandates and clear leadership
• You need clear lines of political authority and clear lines of communication
• Do not blur the lines between politics and governance
• Institutions straddling the public and private divide can help to build social cohesion
• In the end it boils down to strong leadership, and the right kind of leadership

00:00:05
Hooks:

• When you’re in a crisis, you cannot afford political fighting (BN)
• You have to set your politics aside and focus on the solutions (IN)
• Normal rules of political interaction need to be suspended (MM)

00:00:55
HOW NOT TO DO IT: THE IMPACT OF POLITICS DURING THE CRISIS

• Politics makes everything more difficult, makes it much more difficult to achieve anything
• When people are fighting and are trying to win political points, they are not going to be aligned on their messaging, losing credibility (BN)
• Politicking confuses, delays, complicates, leads to point-scoring; perfect storm; reflection on lack of leadership, or wrong kind of leadership (MS)
• Politics initially prevented the release of some information as there was concern about exposing the severity of the situation; when politics died down a bit and engineers could come forward with the facts, things improved (CP)
• Crisis used a political pawn (HD)

00:07:37
BUSINESS’S PERSPECTIVE ON GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

• Business has no real regard for or interest in politics, for who or what entity was responsible for situation or for failures; business just needs the facts, needs to know what government is doing, so that it can decide its own actions (CP)

00:09:00
HOW TO GET IT RIGHT

• All spheres of government, and all users of water, must get together, set their politics aside and focus on the solutions (IN)
• A water safety plan has now been developed and put in place, that will be triggered by predefined conditions
• Technical people should recognise and push back against attempts by politicians to promote solutions that have political advantages for them, as opposed to technically sound, engineered solutions (PF)
• The normal rules of political interaction need to be suspended during crisis periods in order to have a coherent response (MM)
• You need clear mandates and clear leadership (BN)
• Remember: it’s a life and death issue for everybody in that area (CO)
• Clear lines of political authority; clear lines of communication; institutions that straddle the public and private divide; this amounts to strong leadership (MS)
• Strong leadership; do not blur lines between politics and governance (BN)

00:00:55
"I think the greatest learning that anyone who’s been through a process like this could take away is that politics makes everything so much more difficult. So when people are not making decisions for the right reasons, and I mean the blurring between the lines of party and government are always there, but when you’re in a politically fraught environment, that’s fine, things keep going and things will normally keep running and ticking over, but when you’re in a crisis you cannot afford to have political fighting taking place. It just, it makes it so much more difficult to achieve anything.”

"You have to have alignment on your messaging, if you’re going to achieve something, and as soon as you have people fighting and trying to win political points, they’re not going to be aligned on their message, and as soon as people are not aligned in terms of messaging, they lose credibility. So, for anyone who faces a similar type of crisis or in fact even if you’re just in the normal course of doing business, politics is bad, and either you’ve got to run an authoritarian system where people stick to the message all the time, or you need to run a far more sensitive, empathetic organisation where people naturally, in terms of their selection, and the way that the organisation builds values, that you get agreement, you get a natural homogeneity of views, but if you have a highly politicised environment in a crisis, it’s only going to make things worse.”

00:02:43
"Given some of the political battles that were raging, both within the City and between the City and the Province, early on not nearly enough attention was paid, later on too much was paid in sort of particularly concentrated form, and that led to long hiatuses in communication, and when communication came out it was particularly stilted and unsuitable very often for what the public was demanding. Now we live in an age of social media, and it’s instantaneous, if there’s a lull, even for an hour or two, social media fills it, and it fills it with all sorts of really completely poorly informed stories, conspiracy theories, people get onto their soap boxes who know nothing whatsoever, even quite responsible people use it to vent their frustration and anger, so it becomes a very destructive medium. And once you’ve lost control of that, it’s very difficult to recapture the control.”

"And so, some of the narrative that was going on in the social media wildly exaggerated what was a serious set of circumstances anyway, it put forward solutions that were not remotely solutions, it paid no attention to the financial or economic side to it, it pitted various parts of the community against each other – the rich, the poor – it indulged all sorts of prejudices that people had, it allowed political parties to point-score, so it’s a sort of perfect storm, and it’s a reflection on lack of leadership, or the wrong sort of leadership that it didn’t prevent that from happening or recapture control for quite some time.”

"So, what it illustrates, and it’s just a universal phenomenon, when you have a crisis, you have to have your crisis strategy and your crisis communication plan not only pre thought out, but stress tested. Very clear lines of communication, so that there aren’t conflicting stories, and communication that is frequent, informed, credible, trustworthy, with the right degree of technical content for the different audiences, and instantaneous. Nowadays you can’t delay, you have to be able to communicate, and you can’t have politicking which confuses, delays, complicates, leads to point-scoring. You know, it’s easy to say all of this. It’s sort of plain common sense. But in the heat of the moment it’s very difficult to do it and to do it well.”

00:05:43
"There was kind of political situations that were emerging within the City that meant the release of that kind of information was not really allowed. And as soon as the politics basically died down a little bit, and the engineers could kind of come out and say, look, these are the facts, you know, take them or leave them, but there they are, you know, I’m sorry it’s not pretty, but that’s what they are, and the politicians had to kind of toe the line to a certain extent, that obviously did change. So I think for a while effectively the politics got in the way because there was a lot of concern as to kind of almost exposing the severity of the situation that Cape Town was in.”

00:06:26
"There was a balance being played a lot of the time I think also between politics and different spheres of government using the water crisis as a tool to either show how good they were or how bad someone else was, and that really, that kind of really flies in the face of how to deal with a crisis – rather than everyone coming together and having common messaging, the crisis was used as a bit of a political pawn in some ways.”

00:07:37
"So I think another lesson that emerged from our engagements with business is that they have no real regard, or kind of interest in the politics that are happening, you know, within the City, the Western Cape government, or the national government. You know, for most businesses and citizens government is simply government, right? So there was quite an extended period, particularly towards the end of 2017, of finger-pointing, basically, where Western Cape government was pointing at national government, the Western Cape was looking at the City, the City was pointing fingers, so there was this, there was a lot of kind of, basically point-scoring that was going on, political point-scoring, but for a business, we don’t care that, you know, this person hasn’t fulfilled their responsibilities, and this government entity hasn’t come to and responded quickly enough. Like, what are you guys actually doing? And how do we respond to that? So I think that was also one of the key learnings is that in terms of a business’s understanding of government mandates and different organisations and things like that – there’s very little regard for that. It’s, you know, just give us the picture, so we can work with the reality, and make our decisions on that basis.”

00:09:00
"Well I think the key issue is, first of all, all spheres of government must get together, irrespective of who they are. You have to set your politics aside and focus on the solutions. And everyone who has a responsibility must come to the party. That was very patchy early on in this crisis, but I think towards the end of the crisis the different spheres of government were working together quite well, and we’ve learnt from that, and it’s not only the spheres of government, it’s all the users, for example, the relationships between the different users, the urban sector, the agricultural sector. We have to go forward together on this, planning into the future, the management of these systems, because if it fails for one it fails for all of us. So that’s now, to get our systems in place, to get the structure in place, where there is ongoing meaningful communication and decision making and negotiation around the operations of these systems.”

00:10:21
"Now, I think in hindsight for the City, we’ve developed plans to put into place once certain trigger points are reached, so that there’s not just a new thinking how to deal with it taking place at the time when it’s already happening. So that you prepare a plan to put into effect once certain conditions arrive, so I think that’s important, that’s effectively a water safety plan for drought conditions. I would say that that is really important to try and achieve.”

"In terms of the political side, is to recognise it could be a big influence if you don’t resist the, let’s say the temptation of politicians to take what could be seen to be a populist, or you know a route that appeals from their perspective, but doesn’t really meet the needs from a technical solution, engineered solution to the issue at the time.”

"I’ve interacted with people in similar positions to myself who have gone through these droughts in São Paulo, Cyprus, Australia, and so on, and they all have similar things to say in terms of the impact of political influence in how the crisis was managed, and sometimes made very much more difficult as a result.”

00:13:09
"In a world where we will face an increase in quantity and severity of extreme climate events – droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes – we’re going to see consistent pressure being applied to political principals and political executives to be able to deal and manage with these extreme events. The observation from here in Cape Town is that the normal rules of political interaction need to be suspended for those crises in order to have a coherent response. If small, short-term political point-scoring continues to be applied during these crises, it’s extremely difficult to coordinate the response and to coordinate the resources to be able to point them in the same direction to respond to that crisis.”

00:14:17
"When you come into a situation like this, where there is a crisis, you need to have either a very clear mandate, or very clear leadership. In retrospect I think one of the biggest eye-openers was the fact that there were people who were involved in this water crisis who were prepared to allow a humanitarian crisis in order to score political points. And that’s completely unacceptable.”

00:14:46
"There’s one important lesson here: when you’re in a crisis like this, and you’re in government, you manage the crisis, no politics. This is not a political issue. It’s a life and death issue, for everybody, every industry, in that area.”

00:15:13
What lesson could other cities or regions derive from Cape Town’s experience? "Firstly you must have clear lines of political authority. Do not have compromised, fractured, conflicting lines of authority, where it’s not clear who’s in charge and who is responsible. Have clear lines of communication. You’ve got to have one set of key communicators, who have authority but also the ability to speak to complex situations, complexity, but simply and with authority. Thirdly to have institutions that straddle the public and the private divides, and build social cohesion. All of this amounts of course to asking for leadership, leadership with qualities that are sort of battle tried and tested, that have experience, but also that have empathy, the ability to see a big picture, to understand what drives other sectors of society, and to listen to them. Good leaders of course put their ego aside, are able to understand others, to listen to them, to empathise with them, and then to work collaboratively – it’s not the natural position, but I think these lessons, I mean there’s nothing new or nothing particularly startling, but it’s remarkable how seldom it all comes together.”

00:16:56
"That’s why you’ve got to have strong leadership. I don’t think we would have ended up in this situation in the first place had there been strong political leadership, and had the lines between politics and governance been blurred quite as much as they have. It’s tolerable for a short period of time when there isn’t a crisis, but as soon as there is a crisis, you have to, you have to suspend the politics.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Bronwyn Nortje
Independent corporate affairs consultant

Alderman Ian Neilson
Deputy Mayor: City of Cape Town

Mike Mulcahy
CEO: GreenCape

Mike Spicer
Deputy chairman: Wesgro

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape Government

Peter Flower
Recently retired Director: Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town

Carl Opperman
CEO: Agri Wes Cape

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• Before the crisis, Cape Town residents and businesses largely took water for granted: it was clean, it was plentiful, it came out of their taps, people didn’t even think about where it came from
• The crisis experience, when at one stage residents had to ration their use to fifty litres per person per day, dramatically raised the level of awareness of water, with the realisation of how fundamental it is to everything we do, and how precious it is
• Residents radically changed their behaviour patterns around water use
• Even if the extreme water-saving discipline of the crisis period did relax somewhat after the crisis, there is the hope that a lasting impact of the crisis would be that there has been a mind-set shift
• In addition to the behaviour change, as a result of the crisis experience citizens also now have a much better understanding of the nature and working of the water supply system that delivers the water to their taps
• On a slightly larger scale, the same awareness of water that changed residents’ behaviour at the household level started to change the thinking, behaviour and usage patterns within businesses
• Previously, businesses were not really paying attention to water at all as it typically was a very small operating cost for them; once they started doing so in the Western Cape, they realised substantial savings; one retailer reduced its water use in its outlets in the province by forty percent, as a result of which it started rolling out similar measures in its operations in other parts of the country
• Before the crisis many large business had a social responsibility and sustainability view of water, and saw themselves as being on a path of reduction in water use, but there was no commercial driver to their journey along this path; the crisis added a strong commercial driver, leading in some instances to projects to enable real-time monitoring of scarce resources, resulting in substantial savings
• It is hard to get people and organisations to respond to climate impacts as they are often willing to respond only when they’re directly faced with such an impact; the crisis made it clear to people in Cape Town across the board what climate impact looks like and that we were not prepared; this lived sense of what it might mean is an opportunity to make people realise how important it is to put in place things now, for future change

00:00:05
Hooks:

• Business and society got new respect and appreciation for water (FK)
• The relationship that the average Capetonian has with water is forever changed (PR)
• If anything came out of this it is that people now know what water is really worth (FK)

00:00:49
CAPE TOWN RESIDENTS’ RELATIONSHIP WITH WATER CHANGED

• Previously, water was taken for granted; new awareness of water
• People are now aware of their usage, and more careful in their use
• There is also better understanding and knowledge among residents of the water supply system and where their water comes from (CP)
• There has been a realisation of the value of water, that it is fundamental to everything we do, and that it is precious (LFJ)
• Even if the extreme water-saving discipline of the crisis period relaxed somewhat after the crisis, one hopes that a lasting impact would be that there has been a mind-set shift (FK)
• City communication department played a role in effecting behaviour change, including using residents as spokespeople: those who were not saving became outliers (PR)
• Within the Water Resilience Task Team the aim was also to use something of a burning platform to change Cape Town’s relationship with water, including the way the government approached the water situation in Cape Town (CK)
• Awareness of water became pervasive, also among children (PR, HD)

00:10:36
CAPE TOWN BUSINESSES’ RELATIONSHIP WITH WATER CHANGED

• On a slightly larger scale, the same awareness started affecting thinking and behaviour within businesses
• Previously, businesses were not really paying attention to water; once they started doing so in the Western Cape, they realised the benefits to themselves and started rolling out similar measures in their operations in other parts of the country
• Before the crisis there was a social responsibility view of water use; crisis added strong commercial driver (CP, DG)

00:15:14
THE CRISIS AS OPPORTUNITY

• Hard to get people and organisations to respond to climate impacts; the crisis made clear to people across the board what climate impact looks like and that we were not prepared; this lived sense of what it might mean is an opportunity to make people realise how important it is to put in place things now, for future change (GZ)

00:00:49
"One of the big lessons as well that’s come out of the drought is, at a very core level, just an awareness of water. So I think that all of us to a large extent really took water for granted, it was clean, it was plentiful, it came out of our tap, we didn’t even think about where it came from. And certainly if you were to speak to your average Capetonian eighteen months ago and ask them, you know, how much water do you use, I would be surprised if ten percent could tell you. I think it was a nominal amount on the bill at the end of every month, and it was certainly that was not really a concern in their lives. That has completely changed. When you start to have to count your litres of consumption, you know, on the basis of, I’m allowed one flush a day, and I’m allowed to be in the shower for so long, and I can reuse this little piece of water, and do I have enough water to wash my vegetables, or to water my plants, you know when you start to actually start to crunch the numbers and calculate how do you survive on fifty litres a day, does your awareness of it increase significantly.”

"But also, it’s not just about your own usage and how you use it etcetera, but it’s also about where our water comes from. You know, no-one, I don’t think anyone knew that it comes from these six major dams that are all outside of the city’s area, how it’s managed and how there are different users in the system. Now most people could probably tell you within the closest percentile as to what the current dam levels are. And I think that level of awareness of how our water system is managed has increased incredibly, and that’s something that’s not going to simply go away, there’s absolutely no way.”

00:02:27
"I think citizens generally have learnt the value of water, not in its monetary sense, which is one aspect that’s often debated, whether it’s too cheap or not, I don’t think that’s really where the value of water lies, and I think many have realised that, is that it’s actually fundamental to everything that we do, and that without it how are you going to live your life, and if you are going to have to collect it at a centralised point how are you going to operate your business, how are you going to do any of that, I think that lesson lots of people are a lot more aware and I think that’s been great, I don’t think many people have realised how much work was done by City officials to ensure that that scenario was not realised, but I think at least there’s been a realisation that actually water’s pretty precious, and we need to all take responsibility for it.”

"And then there have been minor learnings, other learnings around how the system operates. A lot of people have actually learnt where their water comes from, and that it’s not just opening a tap, learnt that the environment’s key, that you need to protect your stormwater systems, there have been schools running projects on that, so people have suddenly started engaging again with how water in the full water cycle – not just water supply to your toilet – but the full water cycle, and I think that’s been a positive outcome of the drought. And it’s definitely helped push the city towards its goal of a water-sensitive city where a key component is having water-aware or waterwise community. So that’s been a huge benefit and probably helped us leapfrog a lot in that sense.”

00:04:16
"For me, I think there’s a new appreciation for water, just broadly, at least for people in Cape Town and the Western Cape, which probably wasn’t before. You know, the kind of water saving tips and how we started saving every single drop of water which I think is currently unique to Cape Town, probably in the world now, I mean, people flushing their toilets with rainwater and having buckets in the showers and in their basins and so on, almost not letting even a single drop go to waste, I think over time, I’m not sure if we’d be keeping that discipline to that level, but I’m hoping that a lasting impact from this would be that everybody has a new, that there’s been a mind-set shift, and the relationship with water has probably changed forever, which I hope.”

00:05:03
"Overall I would say that this campaign was very measurable. Some of our campaigns that want to effect behaviour change are not, but this one was because we could literally see consumption going down. We saw it going down to levels that it had never been before. And while we did that in partnership with the water department in the City of Cape Town who did amazing things with pressure management and leak detection, I would like to think communications had a big say in, you know, the – I remember at one point the mayor of Melbourne came to us and said the City of Cape Town has done in six months what it took Melbourne eight years to do in terms of bringing consumption down that much. And really anyone that live in the city of Cape Town will know that it became so integral to how people were thinking; people that had never thought about their water consumption before were. I mean anecdotally and in terms of our more substantial analytics we can see that the relationship that the average Capetonian has with water is forever changed. And that is something that I think communications played a significant role in. We went on various different iterations of the campaign, and one very important one was where we had residents themselves be our ambassadors and our spokespeople, so that it became that if you weren’t saving water you were the outlier, because everybody else was. Let us know if there is someone in your street or somewhere near your work where people are using excessive amounts of water, because that problem is all our problem. It became a collective effort, that we needed to keep an eye on each other, to keep an eye on ourselves, an eye on our families and our communities, and constantly remind each other and remind ourselves that if we didn’t change our behaviour today, tomorrow was going to be a disaster.”

00:07:00
"There is one thing about experiencing a severe drought or an emergency of any situation and that is the simple planning axiom of never letting a good crisis go to waste. And certainly my hope with the Water Resilience Task Team was to use something of a burning platform to change Cape Town’s relationship with water, including the way the government approached the water situation in Cape Town, and its assumptions for water provisions. And when the immediate crisis passes it’s easy to slip back into comfort zones and to dimly remember that you couldn’t flush the toilets every time you needed to use them or you had to ration your supply to fifty litres per day per person, but we should never be in that situation again as a government, and I think that if we ever are it should be considered an absolute failure on the government’s part to have not taken these lessons seriously.”

00:08:04
"The times that I felt happiest and most relaxed in it was when I realised how big the support network was. That we were not in this alone. That residents were willing to come on board, business was willing to come on board, our partners, globally people were willing to come on board and help us, that I would go to the supermarket and see the most responsible and amazing water saving messages. I would see our own posters and pamphlets up at clinics and libraries. And when you would hear parents say their children have become just entire water bullies, and say, no mom, you shouldn’t be making pasta, it takes too much water. It was very comforting to have and to know that the future generation is hopefully going to be much cleverer about not getting us into this situation again.”

00:9:01
"In terms of what people’s awareness or how people’s awareness has grown in the water space, I think that’s been a phenomenal change. You know, six months before the drought I think very few people would have understood how our water system works, what their role is in terms of long-term water resilience, a sense of what government controls or doesn’t control, a sense of the fact that climate change isn’t something that might happen in fifty years’ time, but is something which is being impacted and felt by many people across the globe right now. I think many of those things really came to people’s awareness, I mean I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a social occasion since the start of the drought where people don’t talk about water, and I very seldom tell people what I do, if I don’t know them well. So for me it’s fascinating in terms of the types of conversations that are happening, and for me what’s also very important is that while some of those conversations harp on the role of government and where government has failed, the majority of those conversations are focused on what they as households are doing, both now but also in terms of ongoing water use. For me that’s really fascinating. I mean when you go to someone’s home – I did for a child’s school party the other day – and the grass is green, a lot of people were questioning, well, they must have a borehole if their grass is this green. So also that kind of, that peer checking in on each other for me is incredibly interesting to see how we value water seems to have fundamentally changed.”

00:10:36
"But then I think on the business level and the businesses that we were working with, you know, we kept on seeing example after example of in a similar way, at a kind of a slightly more macro scale of what you would see at a household level you would see at a business level. Where, you know, their water bill was not a concern of theirs, you know, the kind of input costs that most companies have been focusing on is energy. We’ve just come out of an energy crisis, energy costs have been skyrocketing, that’s where they were really thinking about how do we become more efficient, how do we look at alternative sources of energy, etcetera. Whereas water was not really an issue. And obviously that has also changed significantly as well. So not only because you had to reduce your consumption because the price has increased so much, but a lot of the time the kind of advice that we were giving businesses was really just to simply start understanding your water, to meter it, but at a much higher level of granularity, so that you could understand how water is used, when it is used, and in what format it was used. So that you could understand that not all water is the same, that you can use different types of water for different types of purposes. And we’ve seen a number of examples of – there is an example of a large retail organisation that’s nationwide, for them, you know, water again was a very small percentage of their bill, they didn’t think about it whatsoever, but because of the crisis they needed to reduce their consumption, and simply through metering and behaviour change campaign and a few efficiency measures, actual devices etcetera, they were able to reduce their consumption by forty percent overall in their stores in the Western Cape. So for them, they were saying, we didn’t, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing with water, now we know exactly, we’ve got a dashboard that tells us on an hourly basis as to every single one of our stores how much water is being used and we can tackle any issues as soon as we see it. Why aren’t we doing this across the rest of the country? Because we’re saving so much water here in the Western Cape, this has forced us into a situation where we need to tackle the water crisis, but actually there’s massive cost savings that could be made elsewhere and make us more efficient.”

00:12:42
"With our focus on sustainability and understanding our consumption of scarce resources, our environmental team – and I think if I was asked would I want real-time data on scarce resource consumption, I’d probably say yes, but there are probably other priorities in the business. But this is a passion project, and literally this team have pulled together a real-time dashboard which measures the consumption of all scarce resources and it has actually proved remarkably informative and remarkably easy to maintain and sustain. So it’s probably, I should have had more faith but the effort to implement, to actually create it was high, but the actual running and implementation is relatively straightforward, and it is an enormous source of value to us. Because when you are monitoring in real time you obviously monitor spikes, you monitor the exceptions, and you’re able to act rapidly, and, you know, these resources are quite primitive and basic. Your additional spikes in work are simply very often leaks in one hundred year old infrastructure, you can rapidly home in on where the area is and you can resolve these, which could have taken almost a month by the time the billing comes through. So we have reaped enormous benefits out of this real time, not because we’re sitting there monitoring it every day but because it throws out exception reports which we investigate.”

"Look, I think we were on a path, there was a consciousness, but from a business point of view there wasn’t a strong commercial driver. And what the crisis, or we averted, there was no crisis, we did not run out of water, we averted the crisis, but what the threat, let’s say, of the crisis did, was it accelerated people’s plans and let them think differently. So there’s no question in my mind that we were on a path, but it was a path that did not have a strong commercial driver. It had a social responsibility driver and a consciousness, but from a business point of view it didn’t have that commercial driver. And this averted crisis accelerated plans for us to do, you know, what is quite correctly good practice in a water scarce environment.”

00:15:14
"I think if I think about the drought and I think about myself and the work I’ve done in the past, it’s really interesting for me to reflect and see how I’ve always been interested in adaptation to climate change. How people and organisations respond to climate impacts, and how hard it is to get people to do that. Because it seems as though only when they’re directly faced with it do they want to respond. And so for me this drought has been a really important opportunity where I’ve seen the whole of Cape Town, from citizens across the board, to businesses, to the city government, to the national government, go: this is what a significant climate impact looks like, oh dear, we are not prepared. And so, I really feel we need to use this opportunity to experience what needs to be done in terms of adapting to climate change. We need to see how important it is to put in place measures now that can help us cope better with impacts that we’re going to face in the future. So I hope that citizens who normally felt a bit disconnected from nature, from climate impacts, from what it means, now have a lived sense of what it might mean in the future, and therefore how important it is to put in place things now, for future change.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Feroz Koor
Group head of sustainability: Woolworths

Priya Reddy
Director: Communication, City of Cape Town

Claire Pengelly
Water programme manager: GreenCape

Lloyd Fisher-Jeffes
Water resources engineer: Aurecon

Craig Kesson
Chief Resilience Officer: City of Cape Town

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape Government

David Green
CEO: V&A Waterfront

Assoc Prof Gina Ziervogel
Research chair: African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities

• There are a number of reasons for arguing that Cape Town is more resilient to drought now than it was before the drought
• At both household and business level, there is a new understanding and appreciation for water, and a new relationship with it; there are now also water- saving infrastructure, systems and practices in place at households, businesses and other users such as hospitals and schools, that did not exist before
• A better understanding of water and an improved sensitivity to it among the citizenry mean that if there were to be another call for a reduction in consumption, it will be better understood, with probably a faster response
• The focus in long-term planning and strategy has shifted from merely reconciling supply and demand to a more holistic approach
• Most importantly, the city government has committed itself to a long-term programme of diversification of its sources of water supply, including desalination, reuse and groundwater, aiming to add supply capacity of three hundred million litres per day over the next ten years, with committed funding
• These additional sources of supply the city can put in place on its own, without any reliance on outside parties such as national government
• Furthermore, this programme has a fixed and a variable component, the latter being adaptable depending on prevailing rainfall conditions at the time, so specific augmentation schemes within the programme can be sped up if needed
• The drawback – and the counterargument that Cape Town is not yet better positioned to stave off a crisis triggered by a prolonged drought such as that experienced over the 2015-2018 period – is that these supply augmentation schemes are by their nature large-scale projects with long lead-in times; once the additional three hundred million litres per day supply is in place Cape Town will be much better positioned to deal with a three-year drought such as the recent one, but this is only expected to be the case ten years from now; until then, the vulnerability remains
• Cape Town has committed itself to building resilient systems generally. But this takes time, not all battles are won, and it requires building redundancy into the system, which often means paying for things that are not used – a hard paradigm to break into
• We came through the crisis not because we are resilient, but because we were lucky

00:00:05
Hooks:

• I think we are definitely more resilient, given what we’ve learnt (XL)
• I would say we are certainly in a far better place than we were prior to this drought (GK)
• Cape Town, I think, is more resilient now than it was two years ago (CK)

00:00:48
YES BUT

• On balance not sure if we’d be able to stave off a repeat of such a crisis more effectively: while there have been many improvements which will help, the needed diversification of water sources requires large-scale projects with long lead-in times, so these won’t be in place any time soon (HD)
• While we have learnt a lot about water, and citizens have a new understanding of and relationship to water, it’s not clear that we’ve become socially more resilient, as we’ve reverted to type and resumed business as usual too soon (AB)

00:04:59
YES

• We are more resilient because we are developing alternative resources which will ramp up over the next ten years to provide an additional three hundred million litres a day of capacity, from a mixture of desalination, reuse and groundwater; furthermore, this programme has both a committed and an adaptive component, so implementation can be sped up over time if required by circumstances prevailing at the time (PF)
• In addition, we are now far more sensitive and the public’s understanding is much better, so if there is a call to reduce demand it will be understood better (PF)
• Better water-saving knowledge and water-saving infrastructure make us more resilient, as does improved information flow between government and citizens (PW)
• Whereas previously the focus was solely on reconciling supply and demand, the new water strategy has five pillars, bringing a more holistic approach and more resilience (GK)
• Augmentation of supply committed to, within realistic timeframes and with committed funding, ensuring more resilience in future (XL)

00:15:37
YES BUT

• Cape Town has committed itself to building resilience; but it takes time, and is a hard paradigm to break into; we came through last time because we were lucky, not because we are a resilient city (CK)

00:00:48
“If we were to get as little rain in 2020 and the next two years as we’ve just had from 2016 to 2018, would we be more resilient? And could we stave off a crisis in the way we did, or stave it off in a more effective way? I’m not sure – is the honest answer.” In certain respects there have been improvements – communicating better, identifying who the stakeholders are, many hospitals, schools, businesses have put in their own water supply systems, improved water efficiencies. “But in terms of managing or providing water from diversified sources, the large-scale type of projects that we potentially need to get the volumes we need, I think we would have a challenge. So there’s a lot of talk, particularly in the City around new water supply schemes from groundwater sources, from desalination, etcetera, but those have very long lead-in times. And they have long lead-in times because they require extensive planning, extensive procurement processes, and then just time to build them. And the concern is that the more we think that the recent drought was potentially a once-off drought, or not to be repeated anytime soon, the longer we’ll take to press the green light for investing in those new diversified water sources … There’s certain large-scale water projects we should be investing in right away. So some of those the City certainly is investing in right away, but some of them are kind of in a second phase plan, and I think the concern is that there’re quite a few those that we should probably be investing or at least starting the investment in right now.”

Another issue in need of attention and a lot of work in a short space of time is the issue of a centralised bulk water supply system versus a hybrid of a centralised and decentralised system. “I think we need to change a lot of fundamental things in the system within a very short space of time.”

00:03:30
“Are we a more resilient city? I think we’ve learnt a lot about water. I think we understand the water system much better. I see my colleagues at the City of Cape Town and in municipalities understanding the need to not just manage their part of the system but join up and influence the behaviour and the management of other parts of the system. I’ve seen citizens have a new understanding, their own understanding and relationship to water, and to the public authority.”

“Are we a more socially resilient city? I would say the jury is out. I think we have reverted to type too quickly, back into our separate areas, separate spheres, separate sectors, and we on the whole continue life, you know, the crisis is over, life continues, it’s business as usual. And it’s not business as usual in our city. We have to continue disrupting the way in which we don’t relate to each other, and don’t connect across the traditional racial, class, and geographic boundaries that divide us as a city.”

00:04:59
“I think Cape Town is now better positioned to deal with a three-year drought than it was previously, for the simple reason that we’re now well down the programme of certainly developing the alternate resources which will ramp up in time over the years to come, but we’re moving on a programme to sort of increase the capacity.”

“But also, we are far more sensitive, and I think the Capetonians are more sensitive, to the need to restrict when it’s necessary than they were before. And I think everybody’s relationship with water has changed considerably, so if there’s a call to drop again, not that it will be a popular one, but it will be understood better, I think, and we will get a response accordingly. I think nobody wants to have to go through that again, and the City is certainly in terms of its new water strategy is not intending for the city to have to go through such extreme experience again. But, you know, we don’t know just how extreme a variation in climate change could impact on Cape Town.”

“But certainly with what’s intended in terms of the committed portion of the augmentation programme, which is the part that is going to be running, and the portion that we call the adaptive component where we can adjust the amount of capacity – desal and reuse and so on – build, is what we’re saying is over the next ten years we will up the supply by about three hundred megalitres a day. And that will comprise a mixture of the desal, the reuse and the groundwater, running out towards the end of that we can adapt according to how the conditions are prevailing at the time.”

00:07:05
“So is the city more resilient? In my opinion the city is very much more resilient than it was before. And there is a couple of lessons that we’ve learnt and there is a couple of factors that the resilience comes from. On the population side, on the citizens’ side we’ve learnt how to live with much less water than we used to … We got used to it. We know that we can do it, we know how to do it. And that knowledge is going to stay with us.”

“Apart from that knowledge we’ve invested in infrastructure, we have the boreholes, we have the water tanks, we have, you know, pans and pots that we collect our rainwater, and pumps and showerheads and so on. This creates quite a lot of good infrastructure, water-saving infrastructure, and creates quite a lot of resilience in responding to crisis like that.”

“Another aspect is the whole sort of interaction between the government and the people, the way the communication goes, the way the information is provided, you know, we have much more transparency, we have much better information flow, which again is something that creates resilience, it creates responsiveness, creates a better possibility to respond to any crises like that.”

00:09:06
“I would say we are certainly in a far better place than we were prior to this drought. I think that what we have learnt is really incredible and world-class. That said, if it is the same type of drought with the same type of, you know, 55, 66, 40 percent of rainfall, not 10, 1o, 1o, because if we get so little rainfall, then we would have to accelerate all our programmes.”

“The reason why I’m feeling fairly bullish about this is that previously the City absolutely had managed its bulk water, it knew what it’s demand was, it had a good handle of it. But it was part of the strategy of the Western Cape water supply system strategy, and that strategy was really about reconciliating water supply and demand. The strategy which was approved by Council at the end of May of this year has five pillars, of which only one is balancing supply and demand. So I think the City is taking a far more holistic approach to how to manage water, realising and recognising the value of water in everybody’s life, so it’s about accessibility and safety and it’s about a collaborative effort, which I think is just so, so important when you’re part of a supply system, especially when politics are a little bit up and down and here, there and everywhere. So I certainly feel that the city is more robust. It’s also got a fixed programme and a variable build programme, so things can be accelerated, the costs have been quantified, it’s been included in the medium-term budget, so that means that for three years, you know, money has been made available on the project to provide additional water over the next ten years. And I certainly don’t think it’s money wasted because Cape Town is a growing city, we want people to not feel guilty for having a five-minute shower. We would want people to be able to enjoy water but in a responsible way. So additional water is required as part of the system. These are things that we can do, it doesn’t mean having to build a dam, and as long as we work at our relationships with others and we have a collaborative view, then I’m sure that will help as well. Another pillar is to go more the environmental route and for example use our stormwater better. So I really think that our strategy is very well suited to provide a more secure and more resilient water future for Cape Town.”

00:11:49
“I think we are definitely more resilient, given what we’ve learnt. It is important to just make the point that what occurred over the last three years is a one in five hundred and ninety year event. Our current assurance levels in terms of water supply is ninety eight percent, meaning we can plan for implementing restrictions once every fifty years. So what we experienced is far beyond what could have been predicted. That just shows you the severity of the drought and the fact that no amount of climate data could have actually prepared or planned us for that. So going forward what we have learnt is not necessarily completely depending on any historic modelling or data that we’ve used to model rainfall and climate change, and making provision for flexibility in our modelling, most importantly understanding that in that modelling we have to be prepared for a water-scarce scenario in the event of another protracted drought. At this point in time we have no understanding of what rainfall patterns are for 2019 – it may not be the end of the drought. So we’ve realised that we cannot afford to go back to business as usual, and we will definitely not be doing that because the risk of that is just far too great. And we can’t be communicating another Day Zero scenario to our residents. ”

“We got started on a process to develop a new water strategy for the Water and Sanitation department, we did that through the assistance of both local and international experts, that looks at augmenting our supply, but in a far more realistic timeframe, and at what we deem is a far more affordable cost to our ratepayers. So essentially we are planning to augment our supply by just over three hundred million litres of water over the next ten years. However, the water augmentation programme that we are planning for in our new water strategy has been stress tested, so it does make room to accelerate in the event that we have another poor rainfall year in 2019 or beyond. We can accelerate components of that plan to get new water into the system far more sooner. It’s very clear as well in terms of how much this will cost, so the estimated cost at this point in time is just over R5.3bn, with additional water demand management interventions just over that amount. And that’s what we are committing to for the next ten years.”

00:15:37
“Cape Town, I think, is more resilient now than it was two years ago. It made a decision, the correct decision, to my mind, a few years ago that it was going to buy into building urban resilience, to looking at the shocks and stresses of the city system, and I have a very simple anecdotal reference point, which is just in my daily job I remember being appointed as the Chief Resilience Officer, on the back of another job I already had in the City, and saying to colleagues, well, you know, I’m the Chief Resilience Officer, and they would say, well, congratulations, that’s great, what is that? What’s resilience? And you go to the City now, two or three years later, no one will question what resilience is. They know what it is. They’re building it. They’re working towards it. And they care about it. And for me that is a massive cultural change.”

“There is still some way to go in truly building a resilient city. I mean, it’s one of the trade-offs for example of government is how do you use resources effectively, and the principle of resilience for example is building redundancy into your system, which is sometimes paying for things that you may not need, or that you may not need to call upon if a disaster is averted or a crisis is averted. That’s a very hard paradigm to break into. But one that we began. When we engaged in the work of the water resilience task team that modified and changed over time, the water plan, but most of those augmentation projects for example remain on the books and are being executed. The demand management projects remain and are being executed, because of the importance of redundancy. The function of resilience thinking and a resilience office, I think, from direct professional experience and reflection, whomever that person is, a resilience officer must be prepared to be unpopular. Your job is to say hard things. The person thinking about resilience is not thinking about what is the best way to manage or utilise every cent of your budget in this financial year. They’re thinking about it in the next fifty years, in the next one hundred years. And to raise these possibilities and these horizons sometimes feels unnatural. It also sometimes is hard to tell decision-makers that a decision they are making now, whilst it seems right in the short term, may have disastrous or catastrophic effects in the long term. And you know, I don’t think that people charged with resilience thinking or instituting resilience frameworks in cities or any organisation should be dissuaded by the fact that their advice will not always be heeded. That’s a function of any position. It’s always a battle of ideas, a battle of argument, a battle of data and evidence. And you don’t win every battle. But the importance is having a voice at the table, and I think that in the way that Cape Town is pursuing its decision-making now, resilience is always a lens through which we view any major decision.”

“You know, in hindsight it’s all very well to look back and say, well, we came out of it OK, therefore we are a resilient city. But I ask the question: are we truly a resilient city or are we a lucky city? We were lucky, I think – it rained. We were lucky that we were able to get our planning and coordination efforts together to reduce demand in the way that we were, and we were lucky to begin to schedule augmentation. Of course that was a bit of assisted luck. But still, I think the relationship between resilience and chance is something that needs to be explored further.”

Interviewees in order of appearance:

Councillor Xanthea Limberg
Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services and Energy, City of Cape Town

Dr Gisela Kaiser
Previously Executive Director: Informal Settlements, Water & Waste, City of Cape Town

Craig Kesson
Chief Resilience Officer: City of Cape Town

Helen Davies
Chief Director: Green Economy, Western Cape government

Andrew Boraine
CEO: Western Cape Economic Development Partnership

Peter Flower
Recently retired Director: Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town

Dr Piotr Wolski
Research associate: Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town

Opinions expressed by interviewees are personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect those of their organisations

Source material from the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, a research resource of the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative

The film library was established with the generous financial support of: The Resilience Shift, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, Aurecon, PwC, GreenCape, Arup and 100 Resilient Cities