Groundwater governance for drought-prone cities

The GoFlow Project contributes to developing an integrated and shared knowledge base to foster sustainable groundwater use and recharge at the city-regional scale

governance for drought-prone cities

The theme of this year’s World Water Day is ‘Groundwater – Making the Invisible Visible’. As it is a vital resource in South African cities, the Water Research Commission (WRC) has funded a research project to improve the governance of groundwater flows for growing cities facing drought risks. By Jorisna Bonthuys

The WRC has identified the need for research into the functioning, governance and sustainable management of groundwater for urban areas, giving special consideration to the wider catchment area that extends beyond the cities’ administrative boundaries.

Research efforts are under way to establish a shared understanding between scientists, technical experts, decision-makers and water users on the implications of different climate and land-use scenarios on groundwater use and recharge in cities at risk of drought.

GoFlow Project Called the GoFlow Project, it focuses on governing groundwater flow for growing cities facing drought risks in the context of the water system as a whole. It started in April last year and will conclude in March 2023.

A research team has been put together comprising: • team lead Dr Anna Taylor from the

African Climate and Development

Initiative at the University of Cape

Town (UCT) • Dr Ffion Atkins from UCT’s Department of Environmental and Geographical

Science • Dr Christopher Jack from UCT’s

Climate Systems Analysis Group • two master’s students. The GoFlow Project is considering governing groundwater flows in the City of Cape Town (Cape Town and surrounds) and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan area (Gqeberha and surrounds). Researchers are conducting urban water metabolism analyses for the study areas, focusing on the two metropolitan and neighbouring municipalities sharing key water sources.

Researchers are quantifying the urban water cycle’s anthropogenic components (bulk supply, consumption and wastewater) and hydrological components (precipitation, evapotranspiration, run-off and recharge), and highlighting knowledge and data gaps.

They will also explore urban water recharge processes under a range of likely hydrological shifts (long-term trends) and extremes (magnitude and frequency of drought), as well as urban planning and land cover scenarios for 2040-2060.

Current institutional arrangements for existing governance are being analysed and multi-stakeholder ‘Learning Lab’ engagements around the applicability of the urban water metabolism analysis and these scenarios are being facilitated. Learning Labs are spaces that provide platforms for solving complex problems. These spaces allow opportunities to assess the approach within the larger context of integrated urban water management and water-sensitive urban design. During the Learning Labs, decision-makers and stakeholders have the chance to unpack future climate risks and explore actions based on contextual concerns and opportunities.

It is a relatively new field of work that combines groundwater’s biophysical and governance aspects at the cityregional scale.

Background Growing urban settlements face growing urban demand and, consequently, particularly severe water provision shortfalls during droughts.

In this regard, the recent multiyear drought in Cape Town (2015-2017) offers valuable insights that could help prepare other urban hubs for the realities of climate change and increased water risk. Evidence suggests that a significant part of this multiyear drought may be attributed to climate change. Therefore, more events of this nature can be expected and pose significant challenges for future water supply and the management of available resources, including groundwater.

Cape Town is not the only urban hub dealing

The recent multiyear drought in Cape Town offers valuable insights that could help prepare other urban hubs for the realities of climate change and increased water risk

“The need for strengthening groundwater governance became apparent during the 2015-2018 Cape Town water crisis. Many industrial, commercial, residential and government actors turned to groundwater extraction at a rate previously unseen. However, this approach raised concerns over the lack of appropriate monitoring of all users (and inadequate usage reporting) and general oversight of groundwater systems.”

– Dr Anna Taylor, African Climate and Development Initiative, UCT

with water security issues. In recent years, other metropolitan areas, such as Nelson Mandela Bay, and smaller municipalities in the Western Cape have been under significant stress concerning their water resources. Of the eight metros in South Africa, seven implemented water restrictions in 2016/17 due to low dam levels.

“Patterns of growing urban water demand and increasing drought risk intersect in the context of infrastructure development and maintenance constraints as well as delays in many municipalities. In South Africa, the governance and regulation of groundwater are generally weak. More work is needed to strengthen it based on solid evidence and sustained engagement between stakeholders. Observational data is also scant or inaccessible for many aquifers in and around city regions. Projections of future conditions are also either not available or at a scale not suited to groundwater resource planning,” says Taylor.

“The need for strengthening groundwater governance became apparent during the 2015-2018 Cape Town water crisis. Many industrial, commercial, residential and government actors turned to groundwater extraction at a rate previously unseen. However, this approach raised concerns over the lack of appropriate monitoring of all users (and inadequate usage reporting) and general oversight of groundwater systems,” she highlights.

Therefore, the GoFlow Project will contribute to long-term and multiactor efforts to build an integrated and shared knowledge base to foster collaborative and sustainable groundwater use and recharge at the city-regional scale.

Previous work The project is building on another WRCfunded project on urban groundwater development and management, published by hydrogeologist Helen Seyler and her collaborators in 2019. Seyler and her team pointed out that decision-makers must reflect planned groundwater use in metropolitan municipalities in integrated development plans (IDPs). In addition, the capture and protection zones of current and future wellfields, and recharge zones in some cases, should also be delineated in their spatial development frameworks (SDFs). The researchers also suggested that groundwater support for the functioning of green infrastructure (including key wetlands) should be reflected in SDFs and linked to appropriate protection measures, especially land-use controls.

The GoFlow Project will explore how urban water metabolism and governance analysis (including various climate and urban scenarios) can help foster coordination and negotiate

The theme of this year’s World Water Day is ‘Groundwater – Making the Invisible Visible’

The current study is considering governing groundwater flows in the City of Cape Town (Cape Town and surrounds) and the Nelson Mandela Metro area (Gqeberha and surrounds)

compromises between urban growth and groundwater protection, and inform the review of IDPs and SDFs to incorporate urban groundwater use and protection adequately.

The research team will work closely with scientists at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and WWF-SA on potential synergies with their work to better understand the city’s groundwater system.

UWC researchers have done work on aquifer recharge in Cape Town, especially in Atlantis and Philippi. In addition, WWF-SA is building a groundwater monitoring network using citizen science that will help to inform the management of groundwater abstraction in the greater Cape Town area. A pilot was completed with funding from AB InBev and is now being scaled up.

In the Nelson Mandela Bay area, the project will build on earlier research that considered high-yielding groundwater areas around Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality and ongoing work relating to the Coegakop wellfield and water treatment works.

Urban metabolism framework The concept of urban metabolism is being used to evaluate urban water resource management. It includes all aspects of the urban water cycle (rainfall, evapotranspiration, groundwater recharge, bulk water supply, treated effluent discharge, and storage).

“The framework provides a bigpicture perspective on how urban areas consume and transform water. It involves integrating many data types that comprise anthropogenic flows (bulk water supply, treated effluent and groundwater abstraction) and hydrological flows (spatial distributions of rainfall, evapotranspiration, run-off and recharge) of the urban water cycle,” explains Taylor.

“Furthermore, the framework provides a powerful way to conceptualise and quantify the magnitude and direction of the various water fluxes in the cities. It employs an urban water mass balance approach to quantify all water fluxes within and outside the defined system boundary (usually a city region). The researchers will use this framework to explore a dynamic compromise between the benefits of urban groundwater use and the problems caused by such use within the context of increasing extreme hydrological events,” she adds.

This framework is used as a vehicle for researchers to assess the performance of the urban water cycle against water management goals and evaluate the impact of urbanisation on hydrological flows. This information is helpful to explore the potential to use alternative water sources (e.g. stormwater, rainwater harvesting, wastewater and decentralised groundwater abstraction) for managed aquifer recharge or other uses.

The researchers plan to understand how stakeholders can use an urban water metabolism and governance framework to facilitate an integrated analysis and multi-stakeholder engagement process. Such a process is needed to compromise between the benefits and costs of urban groundwater use (especially for managing extreme hydrological events).

Actors and institutional arrangements will be mapped out and relevant stakeholders will be engaged in each of the two city regions in a series of Learning Labs. Researchers engage with city officials to identify ways to feed their results into the city’s water strategy, including actions to manage the proportion of groundwater in the supply mix.

Urban water supplies are sourced from catchments outside metropolitan boundaries, shared with several other municipalities and agricultural users. As a result, there is often a misalignment between hydrological boundaries (such as a watershed) and the administrative and technical boundaries that govern water resources.

The urban water metabolism framework provides flexibility to address this by being built around data that adequately represents a chosen system’s anthropogenic and hydrological flow parameters.

Shared knowledge space A strong theme in the research about groundwater is the need to link monitoring and modelling to management decisions (which the urban water metabolism approach aims to do) and combine adaptive (risk) management with governance.

The main outcome of this project will be an improved understanding of how decision-makers can use an urban metabolism framework to facilitate an integrated analysis and multi-stakeholder engagement process to determine a suitable compromise between the benefits of urban groundwater use (especially for managing extreme hydrological events) and the problems caused by such use.