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CONSTRUCTION WORLD
NOVEMBER
2015
ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
With many parts of the country
in the grip of water scarcity, SA
shows a steady growth in national
water consumption that outstrips
available supply; the situation calls for better
ways of conserving water rather than just an
additional supply of water, said SRK partner
and principal hydrologist Peter Shepherd.
“There are plenty of opportunities for
all water management stakeholders – from
local government to housing developers – to
implement innovative designs that will save
water,” said Shepherd. “Some examples are
permeable roadways, water harvesting from
roofs, re-use of grey water, and underground
water storage – ideas that are relatively
simple and inexpensive but which must be
driven by sustainability principles.”
The Department of Water and Sanitation
(DWS) estimates that water demand, driven
mainly by continuing industrialisation and
urbanisation, will exceed availability of
economically usable fresh water resources
within about a decade.
Emphasising the point, the Minister of
the DWS had in 2013 warned that 98% of
SA’s water was considered ‘fully allocated’.
Although this estimate was later revised
slightly downward, the point was well made.
While the National Water Resource
Strategy 2013 plans to increase surface water
yield by about one cubic kilometre by 2035
– mainly through increased investment in
infrastructure such as dams – a sustainability
approach demands more than this, said
Shepherd. He said that there is frequently
a one-sided focus on the construction of
infrastructure to deliver water from external
sources, which ignores the consideration of
ways to conserve, re-use and recycle water
on site. This was a particular concern in
relation to the rapid influx into municipal
areas, where increased population numbers
and fast-growing urban settlements placed
increased stress on municipal services. About
35% of current water demand in SA is from
the municipal sector, compared to just 8%
from industry.
A recent and highly noteworthy example
of good progress in this respect was Nelson
Mandela Bay Municipality’s bioregional plan,
gazetted in March this year. The first such
municipal-level plan to be completed and
gazetted in SA, it was produced with the assis-
tance of SRK and presents the opportunity
to improve the ‘spatial resilience’ of the area
by ensuring the protection and management
of a representative proportion of its diverse
ecosystems and the services they provide.
“This resilience is based on the ability of the
natural environment to continue providing
important services that sustain livelihoods in
communities most likely to suffer the impacts
of economic and environmental shocks –
which in this context could include water
shortages,” said SRK environmental scientist
and partner Briony Liber.
SRK produced the Conservation Assess-
ment and Plan for the NMBM in 2010, which
underpins the gazetted document, and also
assisted with the gazetting process.
Liber also emphasised the unseen cost
of ignoring the social and economic value of
ecosystems when conducting infrastructure
planning – and the savings in future infra-
structure by maintaining resilient ecosystems.
“When planners denude the environment
in pursuit of faster or cheaper roll-out of
services – such as residential estates or urban
infrastructure – they often inadvertently incur
higher future costs,” said Liber. “For example,
if an environmental asset like clean water is
compromised by a plan that allows damage to
a wetland, then that local authority may soon
have to pay for more water treatment facilities
to accomplish what the wetland used to do.”
KEY
to
SAVING
water
and
CUTTING
future costs
The issues with South Africa’s water resources can be
summarised as ‘too much’, ‘too little’ or ‘too dirty’,
but simple design innovations based on sustainability
principles could go a long way to addressing them.
Implementation of such sustainability measures
would also ease future government expenditure
on infrastructure, according to leading consulting
engineers and scientists SRK Consulting (SA).
She said an important aspect of sustainability
in the development context was to ensure
affordability of services for future genera-
tions, and not just current users
and taxpayers.
“We will see more benefit from the
sustainability approach when organisations
and individuals move along the continuum –
from a reactive compliance focus to the adop-
tion of sustainability as an integrated strategy
driven by societal values,” she said.
She acknowledged that financial savings
do motivate and accelerate behaviour change,
especially in the areas of energy-saving, water
conservation, saving materials in its products
and packaging, and saving on waste-handling
costs. However, she argued that organisa-
tions who do not go beyond this point tend
to marginalise their sustainability initiatives
within specialised departments – and tack
them on as ‘green housekeeping’ rather than
institutionalising the approach within the
company’s way of doing business to the point
where value is created.
By adopting sustainability as an
integrated strategy – the next phase in the
continuum – the whole business model gets
transformed into a sustainable ‘borrow-use-
return’ design. In the final stage, she said,
behaviour is driven by a passionate, values-
based commitment to improve the well-
being of the organisation, the society and
the environment.
Biodiversity’s unseen
value
The landmark bioregional plan for Nelson
Mandela Bay Municipality, gazetted this
year, highlights the social and economic
value of biodiversity in an area of unparal-
leled diversity; the area boasts five of SA’s
nine biomes – the Fynbos, Albany Thicket,
Forest, Nama Karoo and Grassland.
The plan provides clear priorities and
guidelines for all decisions that impact on
biodiversity, including land-use planning,
environmental assessment and authorisa-
tions, and natural resource management
in the municipal area.
If implemented, this will help
conserve ecosystems, which in turn
provide frequently unseen ‘services’ to the
community such as attenuating floods,
providing clean water of a drinking quality
standard, facilitating the pollination of
important agricultural crops to support
food security, and providing primary
sources of food.
“Ecosystems provide a range of
valuable services that we take for granted
because we often don’t pay in full for the
services they provide,” said SRK principal
environmental scientist Warrick Stewart.
“When inappropriately located, devel-
opment results in the loss of important
ecosystems, and communities often end
up paying for the long term costs of
losing these important ecological assets.
Good planning means retaining our
priority ecological assets when we develop
our new settlements and roll out associ-
ated services.”
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