The study, published in the journal Science Advances, used California as a case study, where sea levels are predicted to increase 15-37 cm by 2050.

Capturing inch by inch localised motion from space, the team analysed radar measurements from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites, along with motion velocity data from ground-based receiving stations in the Global Navigation Satellite System, comparing multiple observations of the same locations from 2015 to 2023, using an interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) processing technique.

In many parts of the world land is moving down faster than the sea is rising, due to both human-caused factors such as groundwater extraction and wastewater injection, as well as from natural ones like tectonic activity.

But not all of the studied coastline is sinking. Uplift hotspots of several millimetres per year were identified in the Santa Barbara groundwater basin, for example, which has been steadily replenishing since 2018. But periods of drought and precipitation can alternately draw down or inflate underground aquifers impacting vertical land motion.

The study illustrates how challenging it is to prepare for sea level rise due to the unpredictable nature of vertical land motion, which can alter at scale and speed according to human activity, necessitating ongoing monitoring.

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The Forum addressed one of the region’s most ecologically complex and politically sensitive issues, and elevated groundwater on the foreign policy front, leaving India and its neighbours open to multilateral engagements.

“All who came, did so with an open mind to engage and learn from each other,” said Sushmita Mandal, IWA’s India Programme Manager and one of the report’s editors. “It was an opportunity that made the issue of groundwater visible. The timing was critical, as the region was reeling under the impacts of drought, poor monsoons, and improper management of available resources in the summer of 2016.”

How reliant is South Asia? Consider that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh together pump almost half of the world’s groundwater used for irrigation. Groundwater supports the livelihoods of 60-80 percent of the population, and has, as during the Green Revolution, helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Yet groundwater has also been undervalued and overexploited. Excessive, intensive, and unregulated use has resulted in dry wells and declining water tables. Depletion itself can be fixed. But related land subsidence, saline intrusion, or contamination from arsenic, fluoride, sewage, effluent and chemicals may be too costly or impossible to reverse.

The 100-page synthesis is comprehensive, but more valuable than its words are the unique process and diverse people who spoke them. In a thirsty region often known for quarrelling over shared water resources and transboundary basins, the gathering was marked by mutual respect and active engagement.

The Forum provided the first transnational meeting of its kind, a platform to address groundwater management and governance. By generating broad consensus that there is scope to engage, interact and learn from each other, the new report provides a stable foundation for the next.

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By Stephen Foster and Ricardo Hirata*

With 80 percent of Latin America’s population living in cities, municipal demands for a reliable clean water supply have escalated. The combination of drought reliability, low well construction costs and increasingly polluted rivers has led to greater dependence on groundwater. UN-Habitat’s data tracking system lacks specific data, but in recent years many cities have come to depend heavily on this invisible resource: in Brazil alone, groundwater now supplies 53 percent of urban municipalities, amounting to a population of nearly 80 million.

But can urban aquifers cope with the pressures from rapid urbanisation?

For some cities–such as Lima, Merida, Natal, Ribeirão Preto and Belém–the urban centre is surrounded by high-yielding aquifers, allowing utilities to expand water production incrementally, and thus offer lower prices and higher service levels. Indeed, the complementary characteristics of groundwater storage and surface-water resources can be coordinated to enhance urban water-supply security greatly.

Unfortunately, many of today’s ‘conjunctive use’ practices only amount to a piecemeal coping strategy. Too often, water utilities construct new wells for base-load supply in newly urbanised peripheral suburbs, while overlooking the opportunity to use groundwater across an entire urban area to provide greater water-supply security during drought. In the longer term, this is unacceptable.

Urban water users have widely turned to groundwater for private in-situ supply, to improve their own water-supply security. But official statistics often obscure this reality. For example São Paulo states that less than 2 percent of public water supply comes from groundwater, but during the recent water-supply crisis 12,000 private wells provided 865 Ml/d (24 percent of the total supply).

The underestimation causes serious financial complications. Private capital for tapping groundwater is first triggered in times of crisis, but once initial funds are sunk, a temporary coping strategy will persist. Multi-residential dwellings and commercial and industrial users will keep pumping groundwater, especially when doing so costs less than the mains water supply. Thus private groundwater use can have major implications for planning investment in municipal water infrastructure, and public administrations will require a critical assessment of private urban well-usage in order to formulate a balanced policy.

Private groundwater supplies are often more vulnerable to anthropogenic pollution or natural contamination than better engineered and monitored utility sources. But attempts to ban private groundwater use are normally futile, and it is more appropriate to seek ways to maximise its benefits whilst minimising the associated risks. One approach is to register commercial, industrial and large residential users, and charge for groundwater abstraction based on well pump capacity or by metering their sewer discharge. This will also allow advice on water-quality and health warnings to be issued, and if pollution is severe, the sources can be declared as unsuitable for potable use.

Unmanaged groundwater can pose various threats to cities. Urbanisation modifies the ‘groundwater cycle’ by increasing recharge. Yes, impermeable surfaces reduce infiltration but this is more than compensated by recharge from water-mains leakage, wastewater seepage, and storm-water ‘soakaways.’ There may also be major groundwater discharge as a result of flows to deep collector sewers and drains. Such modifications are in continuous evolution and can seriously reduce the resilience of urban infrastructure.

The threats vary with development stage and type of groundwater system involved. Rarely are groundwater resources within an urban area sufficient to satisfy the entire needs of larger cities. So unmanaged abstraction and depletion can result in serious risks of quasi-irreversible side effects, like land subsidence and damaged infrastructure, as for example in Mexico City.

Conversely, as cities evolve, groundwater pumping in central districts often declines, resulting in strong water-table rebound that can cause a different kind of threat, such as basement damage and flooding, malfunction of septic tanks and excessive inflows to deep collector sewers, as was experienced some years back in Buenos Aires.

Groundwater systems underlying cities represent the ‘ultimate sink’ for urban pollutants. Large-scale in-situ urban sanitation poses a groundwater quality hazard, especially as regards to nitrate, some synthetic hydrocarbons, and pharmaceutical and hormonal residues.

Except for very shallow and vulnerable aquifers, there is usually sufficient natural attenuation capacity to eliminate faecal pathogens from percolating wastewater. But the hazard increases markedly with inadequate well construction or poor septic management, which often occur in fast-growing anarchical cities. Thus consideration of groundwater quality should be incorporated into urban sanitation planning in Latin America. The level of nitrate loading will rise with population density served. Municipal water utilities usually try to handle the problem by dilution, but this requires a secure source of high-quality water, which can face absolute limitations.

To fill the ‘vacuum of responsibility’ for urban groundwater, local development decisions need to be closely coordinated among diverse organisations. These include water-resource agencies that authorise well drilling; utilities producing and distributing water supplies; municipalities building infrastructure and planning land use; and environmental and public health agencies installing sewerage and disposing of liquid effluents and solid waste. All of them must be bound by the need to protect the groundwater they share, and a more integrated approach can reduce the cost and improve the security of urban infrastructure.

*Stephen Foster is a Past President of the International Association of Hydrogeologists and Ricardo Hirata is Director of the Groundwater Research Centre of the Universidade de São Paulo.

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Source substitution and treatment can help tackle naturally occurring arsenic. By Arslan Ahmad and Prosun Bhattacharya*

Of all the ways to die, one most lends itself to murderous intent. Arsenic is a highly toxic chemical that has no taste, colour or smell. A victim’s symptoms from a single effective dose will resemble food poisoning: abdominal cramping, diarrheoa, vomiting, followed by death from shock. There’s no simple or easy cure. From the Roman Empire through to the Victorian Age, such a fatal combination made arsenic the perfect killing agent.

Now the so-called king of poisons is threatening public health on an unprecedented scale. While there may be no individual culprit, 130 million people around the world are suffering from exposure to naturally occurring high concentrations of arsenic in drinking water.
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Many have no clue they are even at risk, especially if they rely on private wells and don’t go beyond microbial testing. Water professionals must improve on this tragic trend.

Consider the scope of the challenge. “High concentrations” is itself a subjective and highly contested term. Since 1993 the World Health Organization has set a provisional ‘unsafe’ threshold at 10 microgrammes per litre (10 ug/L, or 10 parts per billion). Yet multiple studies in the last quarter century have shown adverse health effects building at much lower levels. In a significant development with implications for health officials and responses worldwide, the Netherlands recently agreed to target concentrations at or above 1 ug/L.

Geographic scale matters. Regions with high arsenic issues range from Chile and the western US to pockets of southern Africa and the UK. But no region has a more severe naturally poisoning hotspot than Bangladesh, where arsenic afflicts 20 million and kills 43,000 people each year.

Arsenic is naturally present in the Earth’s crust. It gets released into groundwater both by natural and anthropogenic processes. While no “silver bullet” can remove it, two pragmatic approaches can mitigate the suffering from arsenic: substitute a new source where you can, and treat the old source if you must.

First let’s look at substitution. The handling and disposal of residuals may introduce additional complications, which make treatment often prohibitively expensive. That’s another reason to simply replace an existing unsafe source with a safe alternative: groundwater, rainwater or surface water, as technical, economic and social factors allow.

In Bangladesh, the fastest and most promising solutions enable poor rural communities to target and secure arsenic-safe aquifers by themselves. Indeed, local drillers have a vital role to play. They are the main driving force in tube-well installation, and if they can target safe aquifers, what else does one need?

Through the Sustainable Arsenic Mitigation (SASMIT) project, we have developed a tool that links the colour and textural attributes and the geochemical characteristics of the targeted aquifer sediments to the groundwater pH, redox and a series of water quality parameters. Since prevention is the best treatment, abstraction of water from deep aquifers in Bangladesh must not be blindly adopted. In fact, groundwater overuse can push arsenic deeper, making the problem worse, and rendering future costs high in terms of health and water-purification.

Treatment is a backup option. Remediation requires specialised expertise, a good understanding of arsenic’s complex aqueous chemistry, and funds for the more expensive tools and methods. Arsenic removal techniques can be broadly grouped into: precipitation, absorption and ion exchange, membranes, oxidation and bioremediation.

How do you decide which technique is the most appropriate? Carefully pre-evaluate water quality characteristics, target finished water arsenic concentration, and consider ease of implementation. To optimise treatment variables and avoid the wrong technology, conduct a pilot for potential mitigation processes.

Socio-economic realities shape the strategy for arsenic remediation. It is hard to apply advanced arsenic treatment tools in rural settings, given the de-centralised nature of the populations. But the basic principles of many conventional water treatment technologies can be shared, reduced in scale and conveniently applied at community and household levels.

*Arslan Ahmad is a water systems and technology researcher at KWR Watercycle Research Institute in The Netherlands; Prosun Bhattacharya is a professor of groundwater chemistry at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. They are respectively vice-chair and chair of the IWA Specialist Group, Metals and Related Substances in Drinking Water.

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As Xi Jinping ascended to power, he watched, all around him, the equally swift rise of cities.

At his birth in 1953, cities housed just one in nine Chinese; by his marriage in 1987, one in four. By the time he became president, half his country was urbanised across 662 major cities, 100 of them larger than 1 million. From the Chongqing megalopolis (population 30 million) downwards, cities anchor Xi’s ‘Chinese Dream’, his vision of strength, to be reached by marching along ‘the Chinese path’.

Only now that path will not be paved.

While sudden, this dramatic reversal was years in the making. Xi, a former student of chemical engineering at Tsingua University in Beijing, and party leader in Shanghai, confronted an urban paradox. While increasingly in need of supplies, China’s cities were aggressively expelling freshwater.

Indeed, this eviction of water was a sign of urban progress, carried out with the best intentions. To remove an old public health threat–dank, dirty water associated with mould, mud, mildew and miasma–city codes and officials cleaned up, ridding streets and lots of stagnant pools. So across an aggregate 40,000 square kilometres, engineers drained wetlands, tarred rooftops, mounted metal gutters, spread asphalt, poured cement over muddy sidewalks, and sent ‘wastewater’ racing away down enclosed storm sewers.

Never before had so much porous living landscape, been made so impenetrably hard, so fast.

Yet as urban surfaces calcified into a waterproof shell, old problems got worse. City drainage systems were built according to static assumptions, based on past averages; planners did not anticipate or cope with the high-density downpours of a fast-warming climate. In 2013, some 234 cities were flooded due to extreme rainfall–exposing people to lethal risks and eroding billions from assets– while researchers found 641 faced imminent threats of catastrophic urban deluge.

To make matters worse, all that unfiltered urban runoff gushed into already polluted rivers, picking up waste, metals, and microbes and creating a contaminated toxic stew.

As losses mounted, Xi had to act. The old approach would have been to retrofit existing drainage systems, at enormous cost to the treasury and massive disruption of traffic. But there was another option. A porous urban surface could convert an unhealthy liability into a liquid asset which cities could hold back and reuse.

Xi wasn’t the first to embrace urban ‘green infrastructure.’ Officials from Portland and Berlin to Singapore and Sydney have long sought to slow, spread, sink, and store runoff. Infiltration-by-design helps recharge urban aquifers, mitigate floods, and let city surfaces breathe. Cities choose from a menu of cisterns, bioswales, rooftop gardens, retention ponds and permeable pavements, which can reduce half to nearly all runoff. The efforts are known
 as Water-Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD in Australia), Low-Impact Development (LID in North America) or Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS in Europe).

Yet most pilots are small, local, piecemeal, and experimental. China had higher ambitions. And jargon like WSUD, LID or SuDS couldn’t compete with the disruptive energy released in 2013 when Xi announced that the People’s Republic would transform its metropolitan areas into what he proclaimed as ‘sponge cities’.

“By regenerating and expanding its own freshwater ecosystems the sponge city allows stormwater to be absorbed by the soil, which also naturally purifies it and stores it as groundwater,” explains Filippo Boselli of Germany’s World Future Council. “This reduces the burden on urban sewage systems, and during extreme weather events, improves the capacity of the city to absorb water and as such decreases the risk of flooding.”

Since 2013, the cadre of sponge cities has doubled to 30, including megacities Beijing, Shanghai and Xinjiang. Early test areas proved able to reduce 85 percent of annual runoff, mitigating floods while purifying, conserving and recharging groundwater for later.

Xi’s decree is unprecedented in scale. His policy has had massive repercussions in and beyond China. His evocative image has rallied domestic and foreign interests around a shared concept. Moreover, Xi has backed up his rhetoric with strict timetables, hard financing structures, clear governance and sharp technical measures.

Yet urban planners and water professionals–struggling to turn a poetic vision into street-level execution–can’t escape the healthy tension between top-down mandates and bottom-up realities.

One primary strain is competing priorities. What exact problem is a sponge city meant to solve: mitigate floods, recycle runoff, or recharge groundwater? For starters, three is not enough. Che Wu from Beijing University’s Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture told a symposium how “the sponge city must [at the same time] achieve the goal of protecting the water environment, water ecology, water resources and water security.”

Combining goals is also too simplistic. Economic challenges, physical contours and political agendas are unique to each city. Wuhan, at the confluence of the Yangtze and Han Rivers, must keep its streets, stadiums and metro stations from flooding, whereas in Baotou, the biggest problem is water scarcity. “The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MoHURD) put forward a guideline for sponge city construction but its contents are limited to the LID measures practised in the USA and other countries,” says Xiaochang C. Wang, an environmental and municipal engineering professor at Xi’an University of Architecture & Technology. “But what a sponge city should be is still an open question.” Unless each city can define ‘sponge’ on its own terms, the nation’s aggregated goal may fall short.

This leads to a related challenge: the mismatch in technical direction. Leaders in sponge cities feel pressure
to write beautiful reports to meet targets set by Beijing
but have no development plans or sketched out blueprint
to construct the desired results. “Negatively speaking, the budget to support sponge city construction from the central government is attractive for all cities,” adds Wang. “On the other hand, academic and engineering societies also pay attention to sponge cities because there are so many things unknown that need investigation and engineering practice.”

Among the unknowns is cost. It is hard for any city to assess the value of becoming an urban sponge. Benefits must take into account social and ecological amenities
that are real and substantial yet nearly impossible to quantify: open space, biodiversity, recreation, trees for shade, cooler temperatures,
and healthier aquatic systems.

Yet immediate costs do add up, and reveal a rising source of tension: money. To prime the pump, Xi
 initially allocated US$50-100 million for each city, funds designed to jump- start investments. The first flow of ‘top-down’ government cash often accounted for more than 20 percent
of each sponge city project budget. But going forward, the central government plans to dry up its portion. That means “cities that plan to become sponge-like should invest by themselves or promote public-private-partnership (PPP) construction,” says Wang. “This is the local bottom up.”

But without an obvious return on investment, few have rushed to do so. PPPs that build a water utility, power station, toll bridge, parking lot, or tunnel can recover costs by collecting Among the unknowns is cost. 
It is hard for any city to assess the value of becoming an urban sponge. Benefits must take into account social and ecological amenities
that are real and substantial yet nearly impossible to quantify: open space, biodiversity, recreation, trees for shade, cooler temperatures,
and healthier aquatic systems.

Yet immediate costs do add up, and reveal a rising source of tension: money. To prime the pump, Xi 
initially allocated US$50-100 million for each city, funds designed to jump- start investments. The first flow of ‘top-down’ government cash often accounted for more than 20 percent
of each sponge city project budget. But going forward, the central government plans to dry up its portion. That means “cities that plan to become sponge-like should invest by themselves or promote public-private-partnership (PPP) construction,” says Wang. “This is the local bottom up.”

But without an obvious return on investment, few have rushed to do so. PPPs that build a water utility, power station, toll bridge, parking lot, or tunnel can recover costs by collecting user fees down the road. Not so with 
a sponge city. Green infrastructure, drainage and bioswales offer banks no immediate or even long-term yield. The social and ecological gains of soft and porous pavement are substantial, but rarely convert into fat profit margins.

For all these obstacles and shortfalls, sponge cities are backed by one powerful force: necessity. Cities can choose where and when and how to become more sponge-like. They
 can re-classify what a sponge city
is. What they cannot do, in China 
or elsewhere, is simply opt out of what remains the most effective and affordable [see cost chart graphic] response to threats from urban floods, water logging, groundwater depletion and polluted runoff.

Early adopters have taken aggressive steps to reduce these escalating risks from below. Yuelai, a new city on the outskirts of Chongqing, is pushing the concept to a holistic level. It has paved streets and walkways with soft, porous, and springy material that sucks down water into aquifers. Parking lots have gardens that
absorb and filter runoff. By retaining water, the damp landscapes help mitigate the urban ‘heat island’ effect, reducing local ground-level temperatures a few degrees.

Zhenjiang city in Jiangsu Province has arguably gone furthest toward
a sponge city, largely because it
 began planning construction before Xi coined the term. “Before it got funds from the central government, the city had a good water-wise city construction plan,” explains Wang. “Therefore, the budget from the central government was not the only financial source but sped up the planned work, and has prevented water logging in the summer of 2016.”

Others point to Wuhan, a city
 of 10 million in central China, as an early mover in making itself softer and more absorbent. “We are very excited to be part of this pioneer project,”
 says Wenmei Ha, Head of Arcadis’ China water management team. The pilot seeks to improve residential quality of life through low-impact development, drainage upgrades, and a reduction in excess runoff, “blending green infrastructure with other flooding control measures to reduce the economic and environmental damage caused by pluvial flooding.”

Hopes for the movement have been tempered by the hard speed bumps of reality. “Frankly speaking, what China has done so far is still insufficient for replicating and scaling either within or outside the country,” comments Wang. “Sponge city is a good concept but it has still a long way to go.” Current levels of funding and policy support may not fuel optimism of an overnight transformation.

Change is gradual. It requires persistence in pursuit of a worthy goal. To that end, Lao Tzu’s old quote may yield fresh insight for resilient cities. “Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”

The path to soft cities remains steep, hot, rough, and hard. But China has shifted the focus, and offers a bold model for the world. Xi’s national vision may continue to galvanise local plans in a top-down/bottom-up fusion, helping cities outgrow their concrete shell and become, like a sponge, a living organism that half the population may call home.

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The Orange County Water District (OCWD) and Orange County Sanitation District (OCSD) have collaborated in a water purification facility to further convince the public that purifying what was once wastewater can become a trusted new water resource.

“California, and the world, are increasingly becoming aware that we can reuse our local water supplies in a safe and cost-efficient manner,” said Denis Bilodeau, President, OCWD. “We have perfected the treatment technology at our Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS) facility. We are taking our water and our message to the public to alleviate any ‘yuck’ factor.”

Regulations limit the use of advanced purified water to replenish groundwater basins even though the GWRS facility creates water that exceeds state and federal drinking water standards. Under California law, adopted last year to expand the public’s awareness of water treatment advancements as the state moves toward direct potable reuse of this water, agencies such as OCWD are now allowed to bottle highly purified recycled water to be handed out for free as an educational tool. Bilodeau says water is so pure, it is near distilled in quality.

“We are launching a year-long effort to reach as many people as we can in California to share our success and promote a very sustainable process that will increase our water reliability in the state,” said Greg Sebourn OCSD and GWRS Steering Committee Chair. “We’re able to produce safe and great-tasting drinking water, so let’s do all we can to preserve local water supplies by reusing them.”

Although state health officials are drafting rules that could eventually permit recycled water to be sent directly to drinking water supplies (direct potable reuse), OCWD’s authority is confined to using purified recycled water indirectly, to replenish Orange County’s vital groundwater basin.

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Rainwater harvesting and management is nothing new. In fact, this technique has been used for thousands of years in many parts of the globe to capture and store rainwater in the pores of soil or for human use. Growing water scarcity, climate change, rapid urbanisation, and increased demand for water, are once again making this ancient technology a viable option for cities.

The potential for rainwater harvesting and management (RWHM) to reduce water consumption, alleviate stormwater runoff and provide drinking water, has largely been neglected in the modern era. In part, this is due to local context, such as seasonal variability in rainfall, costs of storage, treatment and retrofitting water systems, as well as policy and institutional barriers. Add to this short-sighted water management policies that rely on the overexploitation of river water or groundwater.

For cities and communities to become truly water-wise, the long-term benefits of using alternative water sources, such as rainwater, is key. The decentralised nature of RWHM requires the involvement and cooperation of the communities they most affect. A water-wise city first requires water-wise communities that understand the benefits of such systems.

How can we make RWHM happen in cities?

Integration across sectors and disciplines, and reworking city-wide master plans that promote policy alignment, are vital. As is working with local communities and other stakeholders to ensure the knowledge and capacities for successful implementation. There is a long way to go, but pioneering examples from Asia offer a glimpse of what may be possible.

Singapore

In Singapore, a city-state with limited water resources, harvesting rainwater was a natural extension of pre-existing strategies to reduce, reuse and replenish water sources. Approximately 86 percent of Singapore’s population lives in high-rise buildings, so rooftop water collection systems have been installed to maximise the use of rainwater and act as a catchment. The rainwater is collected in tanks and used for toilet flushing, helping to reduce water consumption, save on energy and reduce other costs within the buildings.

Vietnam

In a village near Hanoi, Vietnam, without piped water supply, the groundwater is contaminated with arsenic, river water is polluted, and bottled water is too expensive. The only option for drinking water is to use rainwater. Several community-based rainwater harvesting systems, including within public schools and hospitals, are successfully supplying drinking water to residents. After site-specific technical, economic and social barriers are identified and overcome, community-based rainwater harvesting can become a promising option to provide drinking water in rural villages in developing countries in Africa and East Asia alike.

Korea

In Korea, studies have shown that 90 percent of total water assets are ‘invisible water’–water that is held in soil moisture, living plants and the atmosphere. Maintaining and increasing invisible water is vital for cities, a process of urban greening achieved by reducing the number of impervious surfaces and retaining it in soil and plants. Invisible water evaporates to become clouds and later returns to the ground as rain, completing a short water cycle. Green infrastructure benefits cities twofold: enhancing resilience against extreme rainfall events; and reducing the urban heat island effects by evapotranspiration of invisible water. Greenery intercepts rainfall and slows down its travel, reducing the magnitude of flooding risks. Greenery also consumes heat energy by evaporation, therefore decreasing the temperature. Did you know that 1m3 of water consumes 700KWh of heat energy by evaporation? That is the equivalent of the energy spent in a day by 100 air conditioning window units.

China

Shenzhen is responding to its urban water shortage crisis by becoming one of the earliest adopters of the Sponge City concept. The city aims to become a water supply catchment, increasing its use of invisible water to provide temperature control. This has begun with the implementation of policies and regulations for rainfall infiltration, retention and storage in new construction projects. Shenzhen has made progress, but still faces challenges to ensure stable and clean water supply. Increasing urban green spaces, Sponge City concepts and retrofitting buildings in cities, are all important methods to prepare for an uncertain future.

The way forward

Traditional water management has much to contribute to future solutions, but we must move towards a new paradigm that considers rainwater as a main water resource within the entire water cycle in a city. By doing so we can align stakeholders to an urban water vision known as a water-wise community.

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Can South Africa regain its adaptive capacity after suffering its biggest ever drought?

By Tony Turton*

South Africa holds a unique place in the international water sector. It’s a developing country, yet renowned for progressive water laws and advanced water policies. It offers an exemplary case study. Yet certain lessons are more painfully learned than others and one of them concerns resilience.

The narrowly defined technical aspects of our profession–dams, diversions, pipes, pumps, toilets and treatment–often obscure how water resource management is embedded within a broader social and economic system. It’s part of a messy political process, involving a myriad of linkages between a plethora of stakeholders.

South Africa is a young democracy, having emerged from a long and complex colonial legacy with a highly charged racial component. A potent mixture of three political dynamics is always at work: race, ideology, and the cluster of science, engineering and technology as an artefact of history. This is like loose molecules floating on a sea of flammable fluid, looking for a reason to explode.

That reason came in 2016. With the arrival of the recent El Nino event, and the worst drought in recorded history, South Africa became a perfect learning laboratory, testing the current management regime’s resilience, or lack thereof.

Because South Africa’s economy is water constrained, its leaders had developed scientific and engineering solutions over a century: the technocratic paradigm of a hydraulic mission. But as a product of top-down colonial intervention, water management was regarded as foreign, culturally insensitive and racially exclusive. In 1994, the transition to democracy brought sweeping reform to all institutions including water.

While other countries had time to adjust water laws and policies incrementally, South Africa made a massive leap overnight. New leaders embraced the best of all international water practices. Doing so was praiseworthy but there were unintended consequences.

All too often, the modernisers simply rejected institutional knowledge, deeming it tainted by colonialism, socially alien and politically unacceptable. To redress past grievances, they expanded the original four provinces into nine, filling leadership positions through patronage that rewarded loyalty over merit.

They decentralised authority over water away from powerful national departments to provincial and local governments, precisely where adaptive capacity was at its weakest. Historically disadvantaged and advantaged water and sanitation municipalities were amalgamated, in the mistaken belief that the stronger half would buoy up, rather than be drowned by, the weaker. Non-existent water rights–of, by, and for ecosystems and humans–became constitutionally enshrined while riparian rights were abolished to decouple land ownership from water.

Such noble ideals are hard to fault. But as Nelson Mandela’s peaceful Rainbow Nation doused the flames of civil war, few realised that lurking beneath simmered anti-colonial sentiment.

And such sentiment links two seemingly disparate events of 2016 which show how politics can destroy water resilience.

First came the biggest drought in recorded history, followed by angry university uprisings demanding free education and the “decolonisation” of curricula tainted by the likes of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and James Watt.

The two events are interrelated. The perception was that, since science, engineering and technology had only benefited a few under the hydraulic mission, it must be rejected as an artefact of colonial rule, and replaced by something more democratic. In a classic case of throwing out the clean baby with the dirty bathwater, rejection of ‘tainted’ technocratic solutions to water scarcity has undermined economic, social, and institutional resilience.

A step backwards

Today, South Africa has less technical capacity in basic rainfall and streamflow gauging stations than existed half a century ago. Databases have been plundered, legitimised by the mantra of the need for a radical “transformation” of society. Expertise leaks into private sector control. Trained local engineers become outside consultants, hired to advise the failing government that purged them. They’ve been replaced by Cubans, ideologically acceptable even if (as defined by the Washington Accord) technically unqualified. DDT, seemingly banned as an imposition of neo-colonial power, was enthusiastically reintroduced to control malaria. A major computing system, which was used to clean up, collate and process all water resource data, was shut down as too costly to manage and considered irrelevant by modernisers.

So, when it arrived, the massive drought came as a surprise. It was rendered invisible from the decision-makers, unaware that critical data capturing systems had failed. Once it became obvious, they lacked adaptive capacity to respond as the drought pressed down. Nature makes a drought; fragile social institutions magnify it into a catastrophe.

How is this relevant to other countries? And how can we rebuild resilience?

Hostility to science is hardly recent, or unique to South Africa. But it gained steam under President Thabo Mbeki, who championed “traditional” African remedies to HIV/ AIDS–dismissed not as a disease but a “syndrome”–thus condemning tens of thousands to death or misery.

It should not come as a shock that a parallel decline crippled our water sector. Indeed, it may foreshadow transitions unfolding globally. Consider just one.

A new president in a globally significant economy, interventionist in posture and fuelled by a scepticism of science, campaigns to dismantle the legacy of policies that improved water management. He delegitimises climate change by focussing on the inherent uncertainty of highly complex systems analysis. Populist belief trumps empirical evidence.

South Africa exemplified this risk in 2016 as a warning for the years to come. But our lesson about the loss of resilience is not a foregone conclusion. Resilience is never built (or destroyed) in a day, or in a vacuum. It is the product of many institutional linkages. The real risk, then, is not from threats to science, engineering and technology but from a failure to see these narrow fields as embedded within a greater socio-economic and political system.

From Africa to Asia, Europe and the Americas, water technocrats can’t simply turn away, look inward, or bury themselves in books, experiments, or abstract research. We need to remain in the game, speak out, and challenge populist beliefs with empirical evidence. To fix this we need to accept that institutions embody the knowledge of how to deal with complex issues accumulated in a given society over time. Tampering with these for populist political purposes obliterates that institutional knowledge and reduces our collective resilience.

And that is the lesson we must all learn from South Africa.

*Anthony Turton holds two professorships in groundwater and environmental management, and serves on the board of various companies mitigating water as a corporate risk.

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Two prime assets of any country are land and water. The list of assets related to water includes visible water (river water, and groundwater) and invisible water (water in the pores of soil, in vegetation, and in the atmosphere). Each of these elements of water, and the interaction between them, has maintained ecosystems and provided water for humankind. All of this water circulation starts from rainwater.

Water asset management can be compared to family asset management. The annual rainfall is like an annual salary. Drought, a salary reduction. Most rainwater originates from clouds evaporated from land. More evaporation, creating more clouds, is like working extra hours to get more income. Heavy rains caused by typhoons from distant seas are like bonuses. River water is like cash because it can be used right away. Groundwater is like an easily encashable heritage left by the ancestors. Invisible waters in soil, vegetation, and the atmosphere are like securities that are not easily accessed. The amount of invisible water is much greater than that of water in the rivers.

“Water asset management in Korea is similar to the asset management of a fool”

Water asset management in Korea is similar to the asset management of a fool. Water is taken from the river for the city water supply, and sent back to the river after sewage treatment. Although the water quantity in the river may be the same, the water quality gets worse as it goes downstream. After draining all the rainwater to the sea, people suffer from drought and water shortages. It’s like a person living hand to mouth, without saving money. To prevent this, reducing water consumption, water conservation and rainwater harvesting should be given the highest priority in water asset management.

Groundwater accumulates over tens and hundreds of years by infiltration of rainwater. It’s like a legacy. In order to keep the groundwater level constant, it should be refilled with the same amount of rainwater as is extracted from the ground. Covering cities with roads and roofs without rainwater infiltration is like using up the legacy. Our descendants should expect to receive as much as we received.

The water in the pores of surface soil slowly but continuously supply water to rivers, even in the dry season. The total amount of soil water is much higher than that of river water. The water in vegetation cools down the atmosphere with water vapor through transpiration. Water evaporated from land and vegetation creates moderate cloud, and distributes the water again as rainwater. It is like seeding the sky to get the rainwater, as we would plant beans to harvest beans.

Invisible water can prevent extreme heat waves. Evaporation from moist soil and transpiration from vegetation can cool down the atmosphere. Cities that have drained all rainwater and cut down their plants will become extremely hot because of low evaporation. Fewer clouds mean less rain and more heating of the land, leading to drought. The reduction of invisible water creates a vicious cycle of extreme weather.

Analysing water assets in Korea can help prioritise water management. Ninety percent of our total water assets are from invisible water, such as soil and atmospheric water. The amount of water in our rivers is 6.5 billion tons, accounting for only 2.7 percent of total water assets. The amount of rain each year is 127 billion tons, our first priority should be rainwater management. Since groundwater is a legacy to be handed down, groundwater depletion should be considered an asset deficit.

This phenomenon is the result of our short-sighted water management policy. Water planning targets only river water and groundwater. Rainwater is regarded as waste to be disposed of. Invisible water in soil, vegetation, and atmosphere, which accounts for most of our water assets, is not taken into account. The interaction among them and the relationship between extreme rainfall and heat waves has not been fully addressed.

A new paradigm of water management is required that considers rainwater as the prime source of all water. We must collect it where it falls, increase the moisture content of surface soil, replenish ground water, and send the overflow to the river. By doing so, water evaporates evenly all over the city, creates clouds and makes more rain, all of which help to increase the small water cycle.

To become a water rich country is like becoming a rich family. Earn more and spend less. We need to create a water law based on this new water paradigm, which considers all the water assets in a country and the interactions among them. This will help better manage climate irregularities such as heavy rains and droughts.

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Water managers across the globe, by the nature of our profession, face daily challenges and draw upon our own knowledge and experience to implement appropriate solutions. Hardly a week passes without a new study being released that articulates the dire state of global water resources. Recently, the American Geophysical Union released a study showing that by 2050, groundwater supplies for 1.8 billion people will be fully or nearly depleted because of excess pumping for drinking water or agriculture.

This is not unique, or even new. Every year the World Economic Forum releases its Global Risks Report, and for several years they have identified ‘water crises’ as one of the top ten risks facing our planet. Water risks are considered to be high and the impact severe, with knock-on effects in almost all areas of life.

The good news is that, where these potentially devastating challenges exist, there are technical and managerial solutions available to address them. Getting the right solutions to the places they are needed can, however, be problematic.

Linking people who have the solutions with those looking for them can be done through networks of professionals. Digital platforms, such as the IWA-Connect, SuSanA, or specialist Facebook and LinkedIn groups, increasingly play a central role facilitating networks that can be local or global. One approach being taken by the Kini Initiative is to leverage existing networks to share knowledge among practitioners in the Asia Pacific–a network of networks. This enables professionals to link directly with others who have faced similar issues and been able to tackle them effectively.

Knowledge in the fields of water resource management and Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), is often built through practice, and is strongly linked with contextual factors and personal experience. As a consequence, this knowledge can often be seen as abstract and difficult to articulate and access. This is where networks can be essential, as conversations flow in two directions, and knowledge and understanding can be shared and developed through dialogue. 

Sharing and building upon practical knowledge for improved water management

To highlight the importance of this, it’s useful to distinguish between three types of knowledge in IWRM–prescriptive, discursive, and practical:

Prescriptive: best practice knowledge, where there are clear definitions of problems and solutions. IWRM plans, legislation, policies and procedural documents all are examples of prescriptive knowledge.

Discursive: frameworks for addressing conflicting values. UN-Water literature, World Water Development Reports, and International declarations are examples of discursive knowledge.

Practical: knowledge resulting from collaborative, on-ground interaction. Participatory planning processes, case studies, and evaluation reports represent the outputs from this kind of knowledge.

While prescriptive and discursive knowledge can be communicated well through published standards, reports and frameworks, practical knowledge is a more difficult nut to crack. Sharing lessons learned and strategic decisions made while implementing IWRM can be difficult to unpack in a way that fits neatly into these formats. Networks may prove to be a more fruitful way to share practical knowledge.

The benefits of sharing practical knowledge can be instrumental in solving complex challenges. Yet, all too often, practical knowledge remains stuck within organisations and never gets shared. Networks can be the catalyst that makes this type of knowledge accessible. When members of an on-line community have a common cause and personal interaction, they can build relationships and develop competences.

I use networks to test new ideas, to get feedback on reports, discover new knowledge, and to leverage networking opportunities at upcoming conferences. When the new Victoria Water Plan, Water for Victoria, was recently launched, I was impressed by the inclusive approaches it advocated, and with the dedicated funding that was promised to achieve its objectives. Through the International WaterCentre Alumni Network, in which I am active, I reached out to water managers in Victoria to get their perspectives.

Through this network, I learned Victoria also has innovative approaches to address climate change, and I was able to connect with key individuals to learn more. This is one of many examples of how networks, and developing connections with individuals in those networks, have helped me gain insight to new policies that otherwise I would not have learned about.

Through networks, water management practitioners can reach out to mentors and collaborators. We can track conversations and participate in discussions, and support one another without having to travel the world or even pick up the phone. We can debate new technologies and new approaches, and we can instantly connect with experts who can give us feedback and insight to guide how we engage in our work. So what’s preventing you from finding your network?

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