African Wildlife Environment Issue 75 FINAL

CONSERVATION

Let's have an honest talk about water BECAUSE IT'S GETTING SERIOUS

Anthony Turton

The summer of 2019 is likely to go down in the annals of history as the year the water sector failed in South Africa. Not a day goes by without multiple mention in the media about a water problem somewhere. Distilling that coverage gives us a simple narrative, that we are heading into a crisis, with some brave individuals confidently predicting some future date.

T hey are all wrong! We are not heading for a crisis. We are deeply in one crisis already. We now need a serious discussion about water. We need to talk about water and the environment, water and the economy, water and ecosystem integrity, and water as the foundation for social stability. We need to talk honestly. Let’s start by debunking the myth that a water crisis is looming, but still some time into the future. The harsh reality is that the National Water Act (NWA), which was the first piece of significant legislation to be published after our transition to democracy, was considered radical in global terms because it stripped away all rights to water, except those rights which were ‘reserved’. These rights, known as The Reserve in the Act, have two distinct components. The one component is the right of the environment to its own

water, at least in enough quantities, and in a flow regime that mimics natural conditions. This ‘ecological reserve’ is also known as ‘instream flow requirement’ (IFR) or the ‘environmental reserve’. The second component is water for basic human needs where no other piped water exists. This is known as the ‘basic human needs reserve’. Collectively both elements are protected by law in a hierarchy that places ‘the Reserve’ at the top, followed by ‘strategic water users’ and then the rest. This reserve is not only protected by law, it must be calculated before any other application for a water use license can be granted. This is where it gets tricky, because the intent of the law is to protect aquatic ecosystems in order to prevent them from becoming open sewers. However, an environmental flow is not just about a volume of water in a river. It's about how that volume moves over time, so it's about a flow, which has peaks and troughs. This is known as the ‘flood pulse’ and can be thought of as the ‘Heartbeat of Nature’, if we consider rivers as the arteries and wetlands as the kidneys. The problem is how to emulate a flood pulse in a river system impacted by dams? You see, the role of a dam is to attenuate the peak of the pulse in order to store it for the duration of the trough. Dams attenuate flood pulses. More importantly, there is limited data available today that shows what original streamflow looked like before any dams were built. Such data was not considered important in those heady days of dam building. So, in truth, we are unable to really know exactly how a flood pulse looked in any given river under pristine conditions. This means that we do the next best thing and extrapolate currently available data, augmenting it where possible, by historic data, to create a simulated model of streamflow for a given reach of a river. Itisagainstthisbackgroundthatweneedtoevaluate the NWA, because its intention was to rehabilitate rivers. This aspect is enshrined in the classification of rivers intomanagement classes, enshrined in Sections 12-15 of the Act. This classification is based on the present ecological state (PES), with no river allowed to be in a severely degraded condition. Such rivers

The Vaal River has become an open sewer in contravention of the spirit and letter of the law. This river sustains 45% of the total population and 65% of the national economy, so its ecological health is of utmost importance

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