SA’s ‘water wars’ to worsen due to climate crisis, Presidential Climate Commission told

‘The water wars as we currently know it are going to get a lot worse as we have increased global heating,” said Dhesigen Naidoo.

“We have to be smart enough to use the climate driver to get the investments in money, in technology, in capacity, to be able to get a climate-resilient water system, so that we actually can meet our Sustainable Development Goals as well as our own development aspirations. You can’t grow an economy without water security.”

Naidoo, who is a World Bank senior adviser and climate adaptation lead at the Presidential Climate Commission, was speaking to Daily Maverick at a high-level workshop hosted by the commission and the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) to address South Africa’s urgent need for climate adaptation readiness within the water sector in Pretoria on Tuesday, 29 October 2024.

 

Focused on South Africa’s Just Transition Framework, the workshop examined adaptation readiness across the water value chain, agriculture, and the built environment, highlighting the critical steps necessary to accelerate climate resilience in these sectors.

From left: Agri SA’s Janse Rabie, Dr Brilliant Petja from the Water Research Commission, Dr Tendai Sawunyama of the South African Hydrological Society and Mike Muller from the Strategic Water Partnership Network during the Presidential Climate Commission workshop in Pretoria on Tuesday, 29 October 2024 to address South Africa’s urgent need for climate adaptation readiness within the water sector. (Photo: Julia Evans)

The workshop centred on findings from a draft report developed by independent consultants OneWorld Sustainable Investments, aimed at guiding cooperative efforts on climate resilience metrics, governance, climate financing, capacity building and social equity.

“The story that’s coming through very strongly is a strong story of inequalities in water and sanitation access,” said Belynda Petrie, owner of OneWorld Sustainable Investments, when presenting her findings after months of research.

“This is coupled with governance issues, unmaintained infrastructure, avoidable water losses … and what that does is undermine readiness for climate change adaptation,” she said, highlighting that investments trickle, rather than flow, to where they are most needed.

Petrie said that currently, three million South Africans had no access to water and 14 million had no access to sanitation. The rural poor and those living in informal settlements suffered the most – compared with the 77% of children living in formal housing, 55% of children living in informal dwellings, and 19% of children in traditional housing who had access to safe water and sanitation services.

Petrie also noted that more than 35% of water was lost to leaks and inefficiencies, with 40% classified as non-revenue water. Only 23% of municipalities achieved “good” capacity scores for water management, a problem worsened by increasing droughts and floods linked to climate change. Projections indicated that by 2030, water demand could exceed supply by 10%.

Read more: Minister blames municipalities for Gauteng water crisis, offering four immediate actions

The four conditions of success

The report suggests four key conditions for transformative climate response in the water sector:

• Making local governments more capable and accountable: Municipalities need to be better equipped and held responsible for managing water resources. Climate change considerations should be fully integrated into planning, budgets and government grants at all levels.


• Getting businesses more involved in funding solutions: More private investment is needed to support ecosystems and economic development equitably. The “polluter pays” principle should be applied, making heavy water users and polluters contribute more.


• Better partnerships between stakeholders: Improved coordination between government, NGOs, private companies and financial institutions. Focus on fairness and restoring ecosystems when making decisions.


• Enhanced monitoring and learning: Tracking transformational changes, implementing research findings and involving communities in data collection are essential for sustainable progress.

Pathways to resilient water systems:

To address existing and anticipated challenges, the water report proposes actionable strategies across four pathways:

• Just policy reform: This pathway focuses on fair and equitable policy adjustments to address environmental justice. It recommends enforcing regulations that require mining and industrial sectors to make reparations to communities affected by pollution, mandating social investments, and rehabilitating mining lands. It also calls for differentiated water pricing, ensuring that heavy water users and polluters contribute more based on the “polluter pays” and “beneficiary pays” principles.


• Sustainable finance: To strengthen financial resilience, this pathway prioritises scaling up a pipeline of investment-ready, climate-resilient projects throughout the water value chain. It emphasises enhancing municipal finance, accountability and capacity to address funding barriers, leveraging blended finance mechanisms and integrating climate finance to expand water sector investments.

• Technology and innovation: This pathway champions the standardisation of climate-resilient Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (Wash) technologies. It advocates for the digitalisation of water utilities through AI and smart water management tools, enabling real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, efficient energy tracking and significant reductions in non-revenue water.


• Integration: The report recommends a Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem (WEFE) approach based on Integrated Water Resource Management to cut the water value chain’s carbon footprint. This involves reducing water use in the energy sector, promoting joined-up planning and budgeting and accessing funds for water projects. It also emphasises aligning policies, monitoring WEFE trade-offs, and strengthening regulations to protect water services. Finally, it calls for better asset management to improve the maintenance and design of water infrastructure.

In the keynote address at the workshop, DWS Deputy Director-General for General Water Resources Management Deborah Mochotlhi noted that the department had undergone a process of reviewing and updating its national climate change response strategy for the water and sanitation sector, developed in 2014.

The workshop and draft report were aimed to augment and support the DWS’s updated strategy.

The DWS noted that consultations held between November 2023 and January 2024 with government, academia, civil society and international agencies informed the updated strategy.

The updated strategy divides the country into seven hydro-climatic zones, ensuring that interventions can be tailored to specific local challenges, whether in drought-stricken or flood-prone regions. Key pillars include cross-sector collaboration, investment in climate-resilient infrastructure, conservation and knowledge sharing.

Following the deputy director-general’s address, the Presidential Climate Commission’s Dhesigen Naidoo emphasised that one of the frontline sectors directly and immediately affected by climate change was water.

“And that’s the big issue, because water doesn’t have buffers,” Naidoo told Daily Maverick, explaining that, unlike many other sectors that could absorb shocks, water resources were directly affected by events such as droughts, heatwaves and floods.

The consequences are immediate – water availability plummets and crops can fail quickly in response to these extreme conditions.

“This is why the adaptation investment needs to be much higher than it currently is,” he said.

Naidoo emphasised that the other main focus of the workshop was to reframe the climate crisis as an opportunity, rather than merely a threat.

“We know that our water systems are inadequate; our water infrastructure is poor; we don’t have the capacities that we need or the right technologies,” said Naidoo.

But he questioned if the climate threat could be harnessed to garner the necessary investments for sustainable and resilient water services.

“Climate change is a very difficult phenomenon to deal with,” acknowledged Naidoo, adding that “it can also work for you to improve your system in a substantive way in the same way we’re trying to visualise the energy problem.

“Can we make sure that water and sanitation services are all given the right kind of boost on the back of climate change?” DM

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