IAN KIRK Partnerships will be key if South Africa is to mitigate the threat of a water crisis
Just 8% of South Africa’s land area provided 50% of the country’s surface water and the country could be on the cusp of a drought, Worldwide Fund for Nature South Africa (WWF-SA) Freshwater Programme head Christine Colvin warned at a Power of Partnerships seminar in Johannesburg last month.
She said South Africa needed to close the gap between supply and demand and noted that the projected increase in water demand would be over 17-billion cubic metres a year by 2030, an increase from the current 15-billion cubic metres a year.
She stressed that a broader cross section of water users needed to understand the role of water and where it came from, reiterating one of WWF-SA’s slogans ‘Water doesn’t come from a tap’.
South Africa’s nonrevenue water accounted for 37% of the total supply and one in ten homes did not have a tap within 200 m of the household, she pointed out.
While this proportion of nonrevenue water was comparable to the global norm, Australia, another water-scarce country, lost only 10% of its water.
Partnerships between government, civil society and the private sector were important to creating a future where healthy freshwater ecosystems underpinned the sustainable development of the country.
WWF-SA CEO Morne du Plessis said the scale of water challenges was such that they could not be overcome alone, adding that Sanlam and WWF-SA had, therefore, decided to renew a ten-year R20-million partnership to promote water security in South Africa.
Sanlam Group deputy CEO Ian Kirk noted that, globally and locally, asset managers were becoming increasingly aware of the risk of the shortage of water and that failure to take action could result in challenges that negatively impact on the economy.