WATER SECURIT Y
Lessons in resilience
The three-year drought that gripped South Africa’s Western Cape region has many lessons in resilience to teach not only South Africa, but the rest of the world.
D
uring 2017 and early 2018, over four million South Africans faced the terrifying prospect of running out of water when Cape Town announced a potential ‘Day Zero’. This would be the day when dam levels were so low that reticulation to most residential areas in the city would be
turned off and residents would have to queue every day for their daily rations of 25 litres per person at 200 manual water collection points around the city. In the end, Day Zero was averted, as the daily drawdowns from the major dams feeding Cape Town were slowed dramatically and the rains of the 2018 winter rainfall season came early.
But the brush with disaster had been too close. If the Day Zero disaster plan had been implemented, the consequences for Cape Town and its residents would have been catastrophically disruptive. Even the averted crisis had serious adverse consequences. Important sectors of the local economy, such as tourism, suffered substantial commercial costs as international travellers were scared away when the Day Zero story made global headlines. The reputational damage to the city was severe, and the social fabric of the city came under severe strain. So, what can be learnt from this costly, narrowly averted disaster?
Learning from crisis by capturing insights
It was in order to answer this question that project partners Peter Willis and Victor van Aswegen founded the Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative in mid-2018 in the wake of the crisis, shortly after the announcement by authorities that Day Zero was unlikely to happen that year. Motivated by the twin insights that, first, the crisis was a multifaceted event, and second, a great many
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