Spotlight series


The Spotlight series offers concise factual briefings, each containing information on a specialised topic of which the interviewee has expert knowledge rooted in deep professional engagement and personal involvement during the crisis.
At around five minutes each, these clips afford the opportunity to hear first-hand and efficiently from experienced and knowledgeable individuals on some of the key subjects to have emerged from the crisis event.
The topics cover a wide spectrum – from the impact of alien vegetation on catchment areas to the impact of the Day Zero campaign on tourism; from successes in non-revenue water to the challenges experienced by the engineering teams tasked with executing an emergency build programme; from initial failures and delays in implementing restrictions to the innovative water map introduced towards the end to effect behaviour change by making publicly available data on water use per household.
Identified, edited and curated by CTDRLI co-lead Victor van Aswegen from the in-depth full-length filmed interviews.
- 1.Was the drought caused by climate change?
- 2.The severity of the drought and assurance of supply
- 3.System reliability and the need for restrictions
- 4.Delays in implementing restrictions after first drought year
- 5.Leadership, data, and calling a crisis
- 6.Challenges of the emergency build programme
- 7.Constraints on emergency supply augmentation
- 8.System modelling, performance and resilience
- 9.Impact of invasive alien vegetation on catchment water yield
- 10.Implications of average usage reduction required
- 11.Behavioural nudges
- 12.The difficulty of segmenting communications markets
- 13.The impact of Day Zero on tourism
- 14.The water map
- 15.Non-revenue water
- 16.Pressure management
- 17.Theory and practice of restrictive water management devices
- 18.Points of distribution
- 19.Building basement water filtered to potable standard
- 20.Water re-use project undertaken by major business
Was the drought caused by climate change?
Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate Change ● University of Cape Town
Recorded: 12 Oct 2018 ● Duration: 04:45
The unprecedented drought experienced by the southwestern Cape over the three years from 2015 to 2017 is commonly assumed to be the result of climate change. Is this correct? Prof Mark New, University of Cape Town Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate Change, gives the scientific view.
The severity of the drought and assurance of supply
Research Associate ● Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town
Recorded: 12 Oct 2018 ● Duration: 04:07
Dr Piotr Wolski puts the crisis in perspective, comparing the severity of the 2015-2017 drought with the severity of drought the Western Cape water supply system is designed to cope with.
System reliability and the need for restrictions
Manager ● Bulk Water, City of Cape Town
Recorded: 5 Feb 2019 ● Duration: 04:35
Restrictions on water use under drought conditions are built into the rules of the system, points out Barry Wood, City of Cape Town Manager of Bulk Water – and the more severe the drought, the harsher the restrictions have to be.
How did the Western Cape water supply system continue to supply under extreme drought conditions? “Really what it meant to deal with such a severe drought is that water use had to be restricted very harshly,” says Barry Wood, Manager of Bulk Water, City of Cape Town. While normally you wouldn’t take restrictions to more than around thirty percent, “in this case we had to go as far as forty five percent restriction on urban and sixty percent restriction on agriculture. It was very painful, particularly for agriculture as well as the urban sector, but it was the only way to get through. We mustn’t forget we’re dealing with natural systems like rainfall and surface water systems. When you move into drought you have to restrict use. You cannot build yourself out of a drought – you do need to restrict use, and that is built into the rules of the system.”
Delays in implementing restrictions after first drought year
Recently retired Director ● Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town
Recorded: 11 Sep 2019 ● Duration: 05:47
Opportunities were lost to put water restrictions in place in the early phase of the drought, says Peter Flower. Save it while you have it, and start saving as early as possible.
Leadership, data, and calling a crisis
Chief Resilience Officer ● City of Cape Town
Recorded: 23 Jan 2019 ● Duration: 05:46
During rapid-onset disasters, leaders respond immediately to things that are falling down around them. Slow-onset disasters, on the other hand, require decisions as to when to call a crisis. Framing issues and prospects for leaders using data and information helps to focus decision making, says Craig Kesson.
Challenges of the emergency build programme
Recently retired Director ● Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town
Recorded: 11 Sep 2019 ● Duration: 06:43
As City of Cape Town Director of Water and Sanitation during the crisis, Peter Flower and his teams were tasked with implementing an emergency build programme. They realised quite soon that the programme was probably unrealistic and unachievable during the envisaged timeframes. He recalls the challenges they encountered that confirmed their initial assessment.
Peter Flower was Director of Water and Sanitation, City of Cape Town during the crisis. Here he shares the challenges experienced by his teams of officials tasked with implementing the emergency build programme. “It was a build programme that, in my view, and in many of the officials in my department’s view, was really on a road to fail … We were required to produce the engineering work to facilitate the Water Resilience Programme, and the guys worked day and night to do the work, and it was significant. Because it’s not just the simple engineering, you’ve now got to deal with land acquisition, you’ve got to deal with environmental constraints through environmental legislation, you’ve got people objecting, you know, people living on the coastline near to where these are going to be … It was a multifaceted problem to deal with that was never going to be managed within the timeframe that was envisaged. What I was trying to advise was that we certainly start going down the road of developing alternative water resources, because we needed to diversify away from being solely reliant on surface water, that was clear, but that we couldn’t use that as the means of saving Cape Town from the drought. It would have to be done in parallel, but with more focus on the demand management … So yes, we needed to ramp up the additional water that would be feeding into the system, but there was a natural limit on how much you could do, and to just set unrealistic targets because it suited a programme, and then expect those to be met, it had never been done anywhere else in the world.”
Constraints on emergency supply augmentation
Chief Resilience Officer ● City of Cape Town
Recorded: 23 Jan 2019 ● Duration: 07:32
City of Cape Town Chief Resilience Officer Craig Kesson led the Water Resilience Task Team during 2017. He sketches the multiple constraints encountered in the planned implementation of an ambitious 500 megalitre a day emergency augmentation programme.
System modelling, performance and resilience
Water resources engineer ● Aurecon
Recorded: 4 Sep 2019 ● Duration: 06:28
A surface water scheme is designed to assure supply at normal levels under most conditions. But the design also assumes that supply will be lower and consumption restricted under drought conditions. During the crisis, the system functioned according to plan, says Dr Lloyd Fisher-Jeffes: consumption was severely curtailed, by almost forty five percent, and the city did not run out of water.
Aurecon water resources engineer Dr Lloyd Fisher-Jeffes dispels misconceptions around the modelling of the system and the notion of assurance of supply. “The city has roughly fifty percent of its demand also assured at a one in two hundred year event, meaning that in a severe drought of one in two hundred years you still get fifty percent of your supply … In this case we had a one in three hundred year [event], as an individual year, and the drought itself was one in six [hundred years], and we only needed to go down to a forty five percent restriction, which, to me, implies the planning, what was planned, was realised … A surface water scheme assumes the ability to restrict and take you down, and the long-term planning has incorporated that into it and assumed that you can restrict. Now, what I think was partially misunderstood was that restrictions are a key part of the surface water scheme. And that assumption of being able to restrict fifty percent might not be so palatable to everybody, but no one had really taken that in and understood that to be what it meant. And now all Capetonians know what that means, because we’ve had our almost forty five [percent], and they’re maybe not so keen on experiencing it again. So we need to maybe rethink about how much we can restrict, especially after a drought like this where everyone has become more water efficient. Can you restrict another fifty percent in the future? I would probably doubt that … I think the resilience of the system was clearly demonstrated by us not running out of water.”
Impact of invasive alien vegetation on catchment water yield
Director ● The Nature Conservancy
Recorded: 20 Feb 2019 ● Duration: 04:48
The amount of water lost every year due to alien vegetation in the catchment areas is equivalent to about two months of Cape Town’s consumption. Catchment restoration, says Louise Stafford, can increase supply at a tenth of the cost of alternatives such as desalination, groundwater abstraction, re-use and additional dams.
Implications of average usage reduction required
Water resources engineer ● Aurecon
Recorded: 4 Sep 2019 ● Duration: 03:56
A substantial proportion of Cape Town’s population live in informal settlements and consume such low quantities of water per person under normal conditions that these cannot be reduced further under restrictions. Dr Lloyd Fisher-Jeffes highlights an implication: in order to achieve overall usage reduction of any given percentage, freely consuming households in formal areas have to reduce their consumption by more than that percentage.
“What’s not necessarily understood and maybe needs to come out more is that when the system’s planned it’s planned at an aggregated level, it’s not planned at a household level,” points out Dr Lloyd Fisher-Jeffes, water resources engineer with Aurecon. “So when there’s a forty five percent restriction required, that’s not a forty five [percent] restriction for everyone based on what they’ve been using before. So if you consider that a household in, say, Bishopscourt is using 360 litres per capita per day, or more, and in Rondebosch it’s probably around 300, in town it’s also probably around 300-350, before the drought, on a per capita basis. When we require forty five percent reduction in water demand from the city, it’s not forty five percent or fifty percent of your 350, taking you to 175, because on the other hand there are a lot of people who are using only say fifty litres already … That’s a large proportion of our city. Now it’s no longer fifty percent for your 350, you actually have to reduce your demand to account for that, so it ends up being a sixty, seventy, seventy five percent reduction for those who were using water freely.”
Behavioural nudges
Professor ● School of Economics, University of Cape Town
Recorded: 28 Feb 2019 ● Duration: 04:37
Prof Martine Visser worked with the City of Cape Town at the onset of the drought period, using behavioural nudges to induce water savings by citizens. She shares some of the findings on the effectiveness of the various nudges amongst different groups and the impact on consumption.
The difficulty of segmenting communications markets
Director ● Communication, City of Cape Town
Recorded: 4 Feb 2019 ● Duration: 04:17
Priya Reddy was City of Cape Town Director of Communication during the crisis. She describes the difficulty she experienced first-hand of segmenting communications markets, of targeting different messages to local and international audiences.
The impact of Day Zero on tourism
CEO ● V&A Waterfront
Recorded: 22 Jan 2019 ● Duration: 05:49
David Green, CEO of the V&A Waterfront, an iconic tourist destination, gives a sense of the damage to international tourism numbers inflicted by the Day Zero messaging. There was, he says, a point where it was realised within the industry that the bigger crisis was the economic crisis caused by this messaging.
The water map
Professor ● School of Economics, University of Cape Town
Recorded: 28 Feb 2019 ● Duration: 04:22
A live water map was rolled out in 2018, enabling households to see their own water usage compared to that of their neighbours. Prof Martine Visser, who worked with the City of Cape Town on the project, elaborates on this as a tool to encourage compliance.
Prof Martine Visser of the University of Cape Town’s School of Economics worked closely with officials of the City of Cape Town to roll out the water map in 2018, “which worked on the principle of the social norm that people would be able to see their own usage compared to that of their neighbours.” It was a live map that enabled users to zoom in to individual property level, showing households that were complying (using less than 10,000 litres per month) with a light green dot, and those that were doing even better (using less than 6,000 litres per month) with a dark green dot. “Households who did not comply just got a circle without any colour in it, so it was kind of apparent if you weren’t compliant, but the focus was really on good behaviour and compliance … Certainly what it did is it resulted in a lot of public discourse around inter-household consumption, and it allowed people to look at different neighbourhoods and make comparisons, and within neighbourhoods people had quite constructive discourse around their use and how they could improve it … The first time that anything like that has been done … It’s certainly I think a tool that other cities could look at using in future.”
Non-revenue water
Water programme manager ● GreenCape
Recorded: 13 Nov 2018 ● Duration: 06:12
Running your business in such a way that a large proportion of your stock is lost or not charged for is not compatible with sound commercial practice or financial viability. Yet this is precisely what many municipalities in South Africa are doing, with non-revenue water rates as high as 41%. Claire Pengelly unpacks the concept.
Pressure management
Manager ● Bulk Water, City of Cape Town
Recorded: 5 Feb 2019 ● Duration: 04:37
One of the standout successes of the water crisis period in Cape Town was the pressure management programme undertaken by the city. Barry Wood describes how the existing pressure management programme, already in place when the drought hit, was ramped up aggressively during the crisis, and then rolled out across larger areas, to great effect, with lower pressure in the system reducing water flows through taps and losses from leaks.
Theory and practice of restrictive water management devices
Senior lecturer ● Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town
Recorded: 5 Nov 2018 ● Duration: 04:26
While sound in theory, water management devices turned out to be a source of contention and discontent among households on which they were imposed by city authorities. Dr Kevin Winter gives a dispassionate account.
While sound in theory, water management devices turned out to be a source of contention and discontent among users, generating significant bad publicity for the city authorities, particularly as the installation was ramped up dramatically during the crisis – at one point the City was installing close to 20,000 per month. Dr Kevin Winter, senior lecturer in the Environmental and Geographical Science department of the University of Cape Town, gives a dispassionate account of the experience in Cape Town. “A water management device is important to measure water, it’s all about trying to understand what a user’s needs are, and to control those needs … So these devices were able to open, allow water through, throttle that water to some extent, and to close it off when that particular limit had been reached. That’s in theory a really excellent way to manage water and reduce the amount of wastage, particularly if there are leakages in homes.” He gives the reasons why these devices turned out to be problematic in practice.
Points of distribution
Mayoral Committee member for Safety and Security ● City of Cape Town
Recorded: 12 Sep 2019 ● Duration: 03:36
Points of distribution, under a Day Zero scenario, would be where Capetonians would go to collect their daily rations of 25 litres per person. Councillor JP Smith shares some of the thinking, planning and detail behind the concept.
The cornerstone of the City of Cape Town’s disaster plan was the concept of points of distribution dotted around the city where citizens would have to collect their daily ration of 25 litres per person once the reticulation to most households had been turned off. Councillor JP Smith, Mayoral Committee member for Safety and Security in the City of Cape Town, shares the thinking, the planning, and some of the detail behind this concept. Implementation was delayed so as to avoid incurring costs unnecessarily. “If we had for argument’s sake decided to go and build the water collection points, or the points of distribution, in January when we realised that this might be a likely outcome, we would have spent several hundred million rand which, as it turned out, we were able to avoid. What it did do is tell the public that we are not kidding, this is a very real scenario, it is very possible that around April you may end up without water.”
Building basement water filtered to potable standard
Sustainability specialist ● Growthpoint Properties
Recorded: 13 Nov 2018 ● Duration: 04:58
Basement water in commercial buildings is commonly pumped out and disposed of. It can also be used, says Nardo Snyman.
Water re-use project undertaken by major business
National Technical Manager ● Old Mutual
Recorded: 5 Sep 2019 ● Duration: 05:14
Successful water re-use projects rely on psychology as much as engineering. Khiyam Fredericks shares insights from his experience implementing such a project at Old Mutual’s Cape Town head office campus.