WE HAVE all heard it said that the wars of the future will be about water, and that disturbing prospect is becoming more and more dominant in high-level and community conversations around the world.
While it may be difficult to think of water scarcity in the rain-soaked Western Cape where our dams are all either full, or close to full, come summer we all know how quickly the levels of those dams start to drop.
Two rather quiet bodies, the Presidential Infrastructure Co-ordinating Commission and the Water Research Commission (WRC), are starting to raise their voices on a more public level about conserving this precious resource.
The good news is that WRC’s chief executive, Dhesigan Naidoo, said last week that we were not as water-insecure as we might imagine.
Establishing the difference between water scarcity and water insecurity, Naidoo said we were not yet tapping the amount of groundwater that was available and had the potential to fulfil at least 30 percent of our water supply needs.
That has to be a good thing. Equally, it is good news that several municipalities are earnestly looking at new methods to ensure that taps do not run dry in the long term.
For the bigger coastal cities, these include sea-water desalination, which is both financially expensive and comes at a cost to our environment. A cheaper option is to recycle sewage water, which is controversial among some people, but which is a common practice in several water-stressed countries and has been practised for decades in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek.
Kudos must also go to the South African Local Government Association, which is trying to popularise the measurement of water delivery by municipalities, whereby each would get points for water quality. Cape Town and Durban are at the top of that chart.
It is important to remember that policies and programmes on their own will not save water: each citizen must conserve every drop they can and we all need to switch to water-wise ways of living.
This is a war we must fight together.