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How Cape Town became a world leader in water reduction
In this episode of The city citizen podcast, the Mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, tells Meghan Mills how averting “Day Zero” led to a new strategy for water resilience.
In 2018, Cape Town faced the frightening prospect of “Day Zero” — the date on which there wouldn’t be enough water in the dams to supply fresh drinking water to its five million citizens.
For episode nine of The City Citizen, Geordin Hill-Lewis, the Mayor of Cape Town, tells Meghan Mills, EY Global Strategy and Operations Leader – Government and Public Sector, about the measures taken to avert the crisis. Also joining the conversation is Siham Salie-Abrahams, EY Western Cape Government and Infrastructure Leader.
A key measure was to engage citizens around the idea of Day Zero, which resulted in them cutting usage by more than 50% for over a year. Another was to improve pressure management, roll out smart meters and publish a weekly water dashboard that’s still popular today. The city’s next challenge? To generate 30% of its water needs from new sources by 2030 and continue to inspire other cities on the road to resilience.
Key takeaways:
Issues including climate change, poor water infrastructure and rapid urbanization mean that over half of the world’s population faces high water stress for at least part of the year.
Cities are addressing these challenges by installing smart meters, upgrading pipes and systems and diversifying water sources.
Leaders will need the long-term commitment of residents, as well as public-private partnerships, to manage the ongoing scarcity while building resilience through new water infrastructure.
A full text transcript of this podcast is available too.
Music
The City Citizen from EY
Meghan Mills
Hello and welcome to The City Citizen, the EY podcast examining how cities can transform to be more resilient and sustainable places to live and work. I'm your host, Meghan Mills, Strategy and Operations Leader, Government and Public Sector for EY. Each episode, we're joined by expert guests for their specialist insight into our theme. Joining me today from South Africa is Geordin Hill-Lewis, the Mayor of Cape Town. Hello, Geordin.
Geordin Hill-Lewis
Hi, very good to join you. Thank you so much for the kind invitation.
Mills
Honored to have you here. Also joining us is Siham Salie-Abrahams, Western Cape Government and Infrastructure Leader at EY. Hello, Siham.
Siham Salie-Abrahams
Hi, Megan.
Mills
So pleased to have both of you here today. Geordin, you became Mayor in 2021, but can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? I understand you've lived in Cape Town since you were a young boy.
Hill-Lewis
I come from a small town about six hours away from Cape Town called Plettenberg Bay, and we moved to Cape Town when I was very young, when my folks split up and my mum moved to Cape Town for work purposes and I've lived here ever since, so for the last 32 years or so, for all intents and purposes a Capetonian. I got interested in politics very young in high school already and have really just pursued a career in the public service and in politics since then.
Mills
So, our focus for this podcast is managing water scarcity. Cape Town found itself in a critical situation from 2015 to 2018, when the city almost ran out of water. Geordin, I appreciate you were not Mayor during this period, but can you just walk us through the sequence of events that put Cape Town in this perilous position?
Hill-Lewis
Sure. I was obviously living in the city at the time. 2015 is the year that my daughter was born, and I remember those years very vividly because they really were very tough for the city and quite extraordinary. Cape Town has always been a water-sensitive, water-scarce area. And growing up in Cape Town, I remember many times where we had to have water restrictions, where we couldn't wash our cars or water the lawn or whatever the case was, but this was something totally different. The water restrictions kept ratcheting up as we went through 2015 and 2016, and the drought just refused to break. And by the time we got to the middle of 2017 and late 2017, it really was heading towards a crisis point where dam levels were critically low, and the rains still had not come, there had still been no break in the drought.
And then as we moved to 2018, we actually had to confront the prospect of what the city called Day Zero, the date at which there would be not enough water in the dams to supply fresh drinking water to the city. That was just a remarkably anxious and unprecedented time. I mean, the primary cause of that, it was a, we are told, once in several centuries drought, probably three or four hundred years that such a severe drought happens in Cape Town. That was obviously also exacerbated by the fact that the population of Cape Town had grown very significantly over the years, and the government department responsible for building new dams in South Africa, called the Department of Water Affairs, had not adequately invested in expanding dam capacity in the Western Cape area. And so those two things really came together to create that crisis situation in 2018.
Mills
You know, you mentioned a little bit about what went wrong, but can you talk a little bit about measures that were taken to prevent Cape Town from reaching Day Zero and running out of water?
Hill-Lewis
Well, firstly, the Cape Town community, the Cape Town residents came together and responded tremendously positively in that they reduced water usage by more than 50%, and it still is a record globally for sustained water reduction, not just over a period of weeks, but over a period of months and even more than a year. The city government really got people to focus their minds by introducing this concept of Day Zero. That concept served two purposes. Firstly, it was to really get people to double down on water saving, and it also got people to really put some thought and planning into what they would do if the city ever got to that point. The city engaged in some really innovative pressure management, installed dozens and dozens of pressure management devices, installed some smart metering devices at people's homes, particularly those that were very high users.
One of the slightly more punitive aspects of the campaign was to start to name and shame those users who were consistently high users, those users who had done nothing to reduce their usage. If I could just add one innovation: The city started publishing every Monday morning a water dashboard, which was basically an online page which gave details of water usage for the previous week and what dam storage levels were like at each of the major dams. That became such a popular website that even now, many years, five years after the drought, it is still one of the most visited web pages in the city. The city still publishes it every Monday morning, and it has become a kind of Cape Town tradition to check water levels on a Monday morning. So, it really has ingrained some of those healthy practices.
Mills
You know, I think that also speaks to transparency, transparency in government, transparency in communications. Water scarcity is a challenge faced by many governments. The annual worldwide economic costs of water insecurity are put at US$5 billion. Siham, looking at the global landscape, which are the regions and countries that are particularly affected?
Salie-Abrahams
There's new data from the Water Resources Institute showing us that 25 countries, housing one-quarter of the global population, face extremely high water stress each year, regularly using up almost the entire available water supply and at least 50% of the world's population, around four billion people now, live under highly water-stressed conditions for at least part of the year. According to the Water Resources Institute, the most stressed regions are the Middle East and North Africa, where 83% of the population is exposed to extremely high water stress, and in South Asia, where 74% is exposed. And if we look at the Middle East and North Africa, it's really the arid and semi-arid regions, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Egypt that face significant water scarcity challenges. These areas are highly populated with densely populated cities, limited freshwater resources, and increased water demand for agriculture and industry.
If we're looking at South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh: In India, Bangalore is facing depleting groundwater levels and water pollution, and the city's rapidly growing population, urbanization, excessive groundwater extraction have put a strain on its water resources. In Indonesia, Jakarta is sinking due to over extraction of groundwater and is facing challenges related to flooding and saltwater intrusion. Again, rapid urbanization, limited access to safe water and inadequate water infrastructure contribute to the city's vulnerability. I think what's important to note is the recurring themes of climate change, limited freshwater resources, high population density, failing infrastructure, poor management, increased agricultural demands and industrial demand for water, and, of course, conflict.
Mills
Those figures and statistics and trends are quite staggering. Geordin, as Mayor of a city with close to five million residents, what are your priorities now in terms of how to manage Cape Town's water supplies over the next few years?
Hill-Lewis
We have what we call a new water strategy that aims to provide 300 million liters a day of new water from new sources by 2030, and we're on track to do that. Our groundwater abstraction programs have already begun and are producing water. We're about to start a major water reuse and recycling program or plant in the city. And then last but not least, we have an 80 megaliter desalination plant on the books for later in the decade. Leaving that last because it is by far the most expensive of the three technologies. So, the idea is that we will be able to provide for 30% of our daily needs from new sources of water, so that we do not have to rely only on groundwater and our bulk supply dams in the future.
Since having been elected as Mayor, I've quadrupled the investment in pipe replacements and pipe upgrades in the city so that we lose less water in the system. Our system is more reliable. Cape Town will always be a water-scarce place. It is likely to become more water-scarce, not less so. So, it will always require the dedication and commitment and cooperation of residents to respect this life-giving resource and treat it with the care that it deserves.
Mills
Is there a collaboration between the private sector as well? Many cities talk about public-private partnerships (PPPs), specifically around infrastructure.
Hill-Lewis
The city has, up until this point, funded all of this investment ourselves, and we have issued a green bond of our own to the tune of about a billion rand, that's just over 50 million US dollars. A relatively small green bond, but it was very well taken up, very well supported. But in future, we do realize that there is a ceiling to our ability to fund these things ourselves internally. And so we are increasingly looking at public-private partnerships. For example, it is our intention for this water recycling project that's kicking off next year, to run that as a public-private partnership. Certainly, our future desalination works will be partnership projects and perhaps more besides; we might even look at projects in the wastewater treatment side that we do as PPPs.
So, we do absolutely accept and embrace that we will have to pursue off-balance-sheet financing, and we are actively doing that.
Mills
Siham, new domestic smart water metering installations are part of the range of measures to mitigate future shortages. How will these help water demand management and control consumption?
Salie-Abrahams
Well, Meghan, they can control consumption and help demand management in several ways. Real-time consumption monitoring allows smart water meters to provide real-time data on water consumption, and they enable consumers to track the usage patterns and identify areas where water is being wasted or consumed inefficiently. Leak detection and early warning, certainly. Cape Town is the oldest city in South Africa, and you can imagine what that says about some of our infrastructure that has been around for centuries. Smart water meters can detect leaks and abnormal usage patterns, sending alerts to both consumers and utility providers that can help lower the cost of supply and help avoid expensive repairs, reducing the likelihood of extensive damage to water infrastructure. At the end of the day, without better water management, population growth, economic development, climate change, they're all poised to worsen water stress. And so, sustainable efforts to address these challenges in the long term have to include implementing water conservation measures, improving water infrastructure and promoting sustainable water management practices. It's not just all about technology.
Mills
So, Geordin, you've covered a little bit of this, but if faced with a similar drought situation that Cape Town experienced several years ago, is there anything else that could have been done differently?
Hill-Lewis
We are actually reasonably confident that it will happen again. It's a question of time of course. The next one certainly won't take three or four hundred years, we believe. We think it will happen much, much sooner than that. The point is to just be as prepared as possible, which is why we can't let up on the deadlines for our new water strategy. In terms of the way that we actually manage the crisis, it's become a kind of global best practice case study — not that it felt like that at the time, I must tell you, you just try to manage your way as best as you can through a real crisis. But actually, we now are increasingly getting outreach from places like Monterrey in Mexico and cities in the south of America, which are extremely water-stressed and facing some of the same threats and pressures, to look at how we managed our way through this. So it's tough to identify what else we could have done. I think we used every single strategy and tactic that we could think of at the time, and fortunately, we got through it. For the future, of course, we don't want to find ourselves in the situation of ever having to face Day Zero again. And so even if droughts come, we want to be in a position where we can be producing more of our own water ourselves and not having to rely on rainfall and surface water.
Mills
So, we are just about out of time here. I have never been to Cape Town, but I always add the cities that I interview to my ever-growing list of places I'd like to visit. And Geordin, just curious, what is your favorite part of the city? What do you like most about Cape Town?
Hill-Lewis
Well, I mean, Cape Town is just a remarkable global city, and it is remarkable for a couple of reasons. It has this enormous mountain right in the middle of the city. The mountain is more than just a mountain, it's a national park right in the middle of a major city — that's quite unique. It has incredible walking trails and cable cars, and places to hike on the mountain and animals to see, incredible flowers and wildlife, all right in the heart of the city. A favorite spot in the city is what we call the Greenpoint Urban Park, which is this beautiful, enormous park close to the central business district of the city, which just brings people together from all over the city on a beautiful sunny day like today, when it's nice and warm, where there's not too much wind about, you will just see hundreds and thousands of families from across the city coming together in that park, and I really love that. So, those are probably my two favorite things, but there's lots more. You have to come, and you have to move it right to the top of your list, because it's better than all the others.
Mills
I will definitely put it on the top of my list. That park and the mountain and everything sound just really lovely. Geordin, it's been really great having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us — really inspiring and a pleasure to speak with you today.
Hill-Lewis
Thank you very much, it's been lovely to join you, and thank you for taking an interest in Cape Town and in our experience of how to build water resilience.
Mills
And Siham, many thanks to you too.
Salie-Abrahams
Thank you, Meghan, it's been a pleasure.
Mills
Do join us again to meet more special guests discussing the future of cities. Also, you can subscribe to this series, so you won't miss an episode. From me, Megan Mills, Geordin Hill-Lewis and Siham Salie-Abrahams, thank you for listening and goodbye.
