Urban Water Security in Africa: The Face of Climate and Development Challenges
Urban Water Security in Africa: Climate and Development Challenges
Abstract
Resilience has been promoted as an important objective for the global development community, especially in response to concerns about climate change impacts.
Focusing specifically on resilience may distract communities from more effective interventions for water security in urban areas of developing countries.
It is more useful to support relevant institutions in addressing current service delivery priorities.
This approach will better enable these institutions to manage future climate change and related challenges.
Keywords
Water supply, water resources, climate change, resilience, management
1. Introduction
Building resilient cities and societies is important for meeting the needs of all inhabitants in the face of changing circumstances.
Resilience has become a prominent goal in development policy (OECD, 2013).
Some commentators question the clarity and promotion of resilience in a socio-economic development context (ODI, 2012).
Adopting resilience as a goal may distract from more immediate priorities unless risks and strategic directions are clearly defined.
The discourse on resilience originates from concerns about the natural environment's response to change (Holling, 1973).
Efforts have been made to link human dimensions to the natural environment through ‘social–ecological systems’ (Berkes & Folke, 1998).
This is driven by efforts to build resilience to climate change under the concept of adaptive management (Tompkins & Adger, 2004).
Focusing on resilience to climate change should be a low priority for local and national administrations in most sub-Saharan countries.
The priority should be on addressing immediate challenges such as building cities with economic opportunities and basic services infrastructure.
This requires strengthening both the physical and institutional frameworks of cities.
This approach will have immediate benefits and enable addressing longer-term challenges, thus building societal resilience.
Examples from the water sector illustrate and support this proposition, reflecting the situation in the wider society.
2. The Concept of Resilience
2.1 Different Meanings in Different Contexts
Current concepts of resilience in socio-ecological systems are complex and debated.
Resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation have different meanings in different disciplinary contexts.
There are calls for greater agreement between scientists on the use of these terms (Gallopin, 2006), focusing on elements of social, environmental, and physical sciences relevant to global change processes.
Limited attention has been given to disciplines directly associated with the implementation of development programmes.
2.2 Resilience in the Physical Sciences and Engineering
In physical terms, resilience describes a material's ability to rebound from an impact.
In materials science, it's the capacity to absorb and release energy when deformed elastically, returning to its original state when unloaded.
A resilient building can withstand an earth tremor and continue functioning without reduced functionality.
A resilient water supply returns to previous functioning levels after an interruption, whether due to technical failure or climatic conditions.
2.3 Individual and Social Resilience
Resilience is applied more widely than in material sciences and engineering.
Psychologically, resilience is the ability to adapt positively to adversity (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013).
Social resilience is the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances due to social, political, and environmental change (Adger, 2000).
Approaches to social resilience have been criticized for ignoring issues of power and authority and not answering the question: ‘resilience for whom and at what cost to which others?’ (Cote & Nightingale, 2012:485).
Social resilience is seen in terms of the well-being of groups of people, defined as ‘an outcome in which a group sustain their well-being in the face of challenges to it’ (Hall & Lamont, 2013).
Social resilience is often the result of political processes through which states moderate the impact of markets.
It does not necessarily involve returning to a prior condition; the fundamental measure is the achievement of well-being, even with significant modifications to social frameworks.
A resilient people can withstand economic and social challenges and shocks and be better off afterwards.
Life in Zimbabwe over the past decade has required individual resilience, and there are signs that society is regaining cohesion, optimism, energy, and direction.
Movement back towards a different but more desirable state, associated with a better quality of life, would indicate social resilience.
2.4 Resilience in Social–Ecological Systems
Resilience can mean returning to a state that is different but still acceptable, which is central to the resilience of socio-ecological systems.
‘Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks’ (Walker et al., 2004:2).
This definition has dominated recent theoretical considerations of resilience and is attractive to environmental scientists and policy-makers.
It directs us to consider ways in which a functional environment can be sustained without preserving an existing ecological and social environment in a constant state of equilibrium.
This offers an interesting approach to understanding the challenges of global change but may not be of assistance in devising practical policy responses at a local level.
2.5 Assessing Resilience
Physical and engineering resilience can be measured by virtue of their explicit definitions.
Direct measurement of social resilience is methodologically difficult due to inevitable subjectivity.
One approach might be to use practical indicators such as access to safe water or other determinants of the quality of life.
A measure of social resilience could be whether, after a shock or disaster, people are again able to find sufficient, safe water reliably.
The experience of Harare, which suffered long periods of water shortages and crises, suggests this might be a useful measure (ADB, 2010).
Between 2000 and 2012, the time taken for households to collect water increased significantly, and access to safe water declined steadily in Harare (Hopewell & Graham, 2014).
From these indicators, it might be concluded that Zimbabwean urban society has not yet recovered from the disruptions and shocks, raising questions about its resilience.
3. Resilience in Practice – Understanding Addressing Risk and Vulnerability
3.1 Risk and Vulnerability
Assessing resilience and designing strategies require consideration of risk and vulnerability.
Risk is defined as the ‘effect of uncertainty on objectives’ (ISO, 2009:section 2.1).
Vulnerability is the product of the risk and the extent of exposure to that risk.
Strategies to increase resilience require identifying relevant risks and vulnerabilities and actions to mitigate them.
For example, in a piped water network, there is a risk of a main pipe breaking, interrupting the water supply.
The probability of a break can be estimated from records of previous events in similar systems.
The potential impact depends on the number of people who depend on that supply and whether there are alternative supplies.
The vulnerability of the community to water supply interruptions may be reduced by building a second pipeline.
Reducing the number of households that depend on a single source would also reduce overall vulnerability.
There remains a smaller risk that multiple pipelines could fail, so the community would remain vulnerable, although less so.
To further reduce vulnerability, alternatives such as local boreholes could be considered.
A community with different types of water source will be more resilient to failures of part of a system than one dependent on just a single source.
3.2 Technical and Physical Responses to Risk and Vulnerability
3.2.1 Building-in Redundancy to Enhance Reliability
These examples illustrate approaches that may increase the technical resilience of a system.
Engineers have traditionally considered resilience when designing large systems for water or electricity supply, often described as reliability or risk reduction (Faber & Stewart [2003]).
One approach is to build ‘redundancy’ into systems so that they continue to work even if one component fails.
Instead of reducing the risk of a pipeline failure by specifying a stronger pipe, duplicate supply lines or alternative sources of water are developed.
When equipment is specified, a reserve capacity is provided.
Rather than a single large pump, two or three smaller pumps are installed; if one fails, there is always one in reserve (Wagner et al. [1988]).
3.2.2 Mitigating Design Risks by Robust Assumptions and Systematic Monitoring
Technical resilience is determined by the physical design and the assumptions which underlie that design.
Water supply systems are designed to meet the assumed needs of a community, including the quantity of water used by each household and an allowance for system losses (Ashton et al., 2008).
A system may fail if the proportion of water lost in local distribution exceeds the allowance or if household consumption is higher than anticipated due to internal leaks or uncontrolled usage in the absence of effective metering and billing.
If the assumptions made by the designers are wrong or managers fail to control water use and consumption grows faster than expected, the system may fail to meet the needs of the community it serves.
This monitoring and response is a key technical function for water managers, and systems in which it is absent will be less resilient.
3.2.3 Recognising and Dealing with Uncertainty
Factors on the supply side also determine the technical resilience of a system.
Climate change has raised questions about the applicability of traditional technical assumptions about the probability of rainfall and the scale of floods and droughts.
In the past, these have been estimated by applying sophisticated statistical analysis to historic data.
The underlying assumption is that climatic phenomena vary around a constant mean value and that average temperatures and rainfall will stay the same over time.
It is now suggested that this is no longer applicable and that, due to climate change as well as other factors, we have reached ‘the end of stationarity’ (Stakhiv, 2010).
As a consequence, design parameters will require more careful consideration.
3.3 Beyond Technical Responses
3.3.1 A Wider Perspective
Achieving resilience in water supply and urban systems functioning cannot be addressed simply through the design and construction of technically resilient systems.
A series of other factors must be addressed if resilience is to be achieved, assessed in terms of a reliable supply that meets the needs of its users.
Many of these depend on the effective management of the system once implemented which is, in turn, impacted upon by broader societal forces.
3.3.2 Economic and Financial Considerations
Building a resilient water supply, like building a resilient society, is thus much more than a technical challenge.
Unless a community, settlement, city or country has an adequate economic base, it is unlikely to be able to manage adequately the risks associated with an uncertain natural resource.
Particularly in large urban areas, where self-sufficiency of households or local communities is rarely a feasible option, the availability and allocation of adequate financial resources determines whether a society can build the infrastructure – physical and institutional – that it needs for its resilience.
If the society can only afford a system that provides enough water in normal years, it will not be able to meet the needs in a year of drought.
Most of sub-Saharan Africa has enough water, in aggregate, to meet societal needs.
However, the concentration of populations in urban areas requires the construction of infrastructure to capture, store and transport the water to where it is needed.
A review concluded that several nations with the greatest need for resilience to rainfall variability are among the poorest and lack the financial resources to take the necessary measures (Brown & Lall, 2006:315).
Poor countries lack the water security needed to underpin economic growth because they do not have the financial resources to manage water resource variability (Brown et al., 2013).
The primary risk in poorer communities and countries is therefore that there will simply not be enough money to address basic needs effectively; it is widely accepted that in most of sub-Saharan Africa, water scarcity is an economic construct rather than a physical reality (IWMI, 2007).
A review of the financial requirements to meet the Millennium Development Goal target of reducing the proportion of people without safe water concluded that there would be a large gap between current financial flows and the investment estimates and that the annual funds going into the sector as a whole would need to roughly double’ (World Water Council, 2003:13).
This diagnosis has been borne out by the limited progress subsequently made in Africa on the goals for water supply.
Of the global total of 748 million people without access to improved drinking water in 2012, 325 million (43%) were in sub-Saharan Africa; the proportion of urban dwellers served in the region changed only marginally between 1990 and 2012 (from 15% to 17%).
Since urban populations grew far faster, this means that the absolute number of urban dwellers without access to safe water increased significantly (WHO/UNICEF, 2014).
The decreasing access to safe water in Harare was closely associated with economic decline, a practical illustration of the impact of economic circumstances on social resilience.
Particularly in urban areas, a related problem is that although there is often the economic potential to support investments that would, inter alia, enhance resilience, finance is not available to translate this potential into investment.
Even where users can afford to pay the costs, financiers are reluctant to accept the risk inherent in long-term loans of defaults caused by local political action or wider external impacts.
The resilience of the financial system (NEF, 2015) then becomes a further determinant of the ability of communities to reduce their risks and increase their resilience.
3.3.3 Institutional Considerations
Economic and financial considerations are important determinants of societal resilience.
Water supply systems are tested by far more than simply technical and financial issues.
Many of these relate to the way in which societies organise their affairs and manage change; in short, to institutional issues.
The quality of planning, to ensure that actions required to sustain supplies are identified and acted upon at the right time, will determine whether the system continues to meet its objectives.
So too will the administration of operation, to ensure that consumption is monitored; that appropriate measures to control wasteful water use (tariffs or social pressure) are applied where necessary; and that maintenance is done when leaks are found.
Any weakness in this technical administration will reduce the resilience of the supply – and of the community that depends on it.
Beyond these issues, which remain focused on ‘soft’ dimensions of technical systems, there are broader risks and vulnerabilities that, if addressed, may make an even greater contribution to societal resilience.
These include security and political risks as well as risks inherent in social cooperation and institutional coordination.
3.3.4 The Impact of Political, Security and Administrative Risks
Political risk can contribute to water-related vulnerability and reduce resilience if political considerations are allowed to override technical advice.
Common problems encountered specific to the water sector include external interference in administrative decisions, such as billing and metering or investment planning.
These may contribute to weakening the resilience of the systems required to ensure that a community continues to have access to safe water.
Political reluctance to introduce unpopular measures such as water rationing can therefore have serious consequences.
In 2010, the South African town of Beaufort West failed to curb water use before its dam ran dry or to repair the boreholes that offered an alternative source, leaving its 50 000 inhabitants in crisis due to a failure of administrative planning and political action (Holloway et al., 2012).
Political risk of a similar kind led to water supply failures for 30 million people in the Brazilian metropolitan areas of Sao Paulo in 2015.
Investments to increase the supply were delayed by complex institutional arrangements involving municipal, state and national governments, controlled by different political parties (Zero Hora, 2014).
Water rationing was opposed by the national government, which faced elections (Brasil Post, 2014).
The resulting supply failures showed how political imperatives can trump technical analysis and reduce the resilience of an entire region.
In Zimbabwe, a pertinent example was provided when the government cancelled debts owed by water users to urban municipalities ahead of the 2013 national elections, reducing the resilience of urban water supplies (Human Rights Watch, 2013; New Zimbabwe News, 2013).
3.3.5 Cooperation as a Source of Institutional Resilience
A particular challenge in the use of natural resources is the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin, 1968), the failure of societies to find ways to manage sustainably public goods such as fisheries, forests, grazing and water resources.
The economic argument is that, where it is not possible to prevent members of a community from using a limited natural resource, it is in each individual’s interest to use as much as possible while it is still available, even if the resource is eventually destroyed.
For a society dependent on such common natural resources, their sustainable management is a matter of survival and determines the resilience of that society.
Nobel prize-winner Professor Elinor Ostrom investigated how this could be achieved and found that individuals in small communities often cooperated successfully to manage shared ‘commons’ rather than maximise their individual gain (Ostrom, 2008).
However, Ostrom also warned that organising such cooperation in larger communities was a lot more difficult than in the smaller cases which she studied, where many of the participants knew each other and were able to monitor each other’s actions.
To mitigate the risk of what other authors have termed ‘cooperation failure’, Ostrom (2009) recommended that central authorities, such as national governments, should establish frameworks which would support and guide efforts by users to create effective management mechanisms for their local resources.
3.3.6 Institutional Cooperation Succeeds in South Africa but Fails in Thailand
The relevance of Ostrom’s findings has been demonstrated in practice in South Africa (Muller, 2012).
The intensively used Vaal River system, which connects a number of rivers and supplies the country’s largest urban conglomeration, has successfully met society’s needs over many decades.
A feature of its management is that major water users work together with government agencies to plan and monitor its operation, proactively managing their water risk and strengthening resilience.
This shows how a structured framework can enable a family of different institutions with common interests to work together to share a scarce resource.
This is in contrast to the situation in electricity where one large national utility is dominant, with inadequate countervailing powers from users to challenge inappropriate decisions or investment delays.
As a consequence, South Africa has suffered a series of power shortages while water supplies have been relatively reliable; the price of electricity spiralled dramatically, beyond the reach of many consumers, while that of water rose only slightly more than inflation, despite substantial investment in system expansion.
The consequences of failing to achieve effective collective management in the water sector were demonstrated by Thailand’s 2011 flood disaster, the most expensive in history in terms of damage to insured property (Swiss, 2012).
Experts cited ‘Poor governance and coordination of the national and local governments’ (Haraguchi & Upmanu, 2012) as well as ‘social and political involvement in unsystematic and unprepared ways caused confrontation and conflicts on flood operation’ (Koontanakulvong, 2012) as prime causes of the predictable and preventable disaster.
The Thai example highlights the overarching challenge of water resources management, the need for coordinated public action guided by a goal of optimal use rather than the achievement of individual institutional goals.
Institutional resilience may come not from a single strong organisation but from interaction between a number of different organisations.
However, there is a need for a framework within which they have sufficient ‘voice’, channels of communication and capacity to engage.
Critically, they must share a common set of high-level goals.
4. Resilience May Derive from Simply Meeting Peoples’ Needs
4.1 How Short-Term Actions Address Long-Term Climate Challenges
Climate change presents significant risks to water security in the longer term.
However, these are complex and generally cannot be predicted with any great certainty.
In the communities most affected, there is usually a lack of capacity to deal with the challenges posed.
In poor societies, the overriding priority is the short-term one of achieving access to basic services, resulting in limited commitment to actions that do not address this immediate goal.
However, actions to address short-term priorities are not necessarily incompatible with the broader objective of building urban resilience to longer term climate change.
The provision of services requires a range of institutional capacities to be developed.
In water provision, these include long-term planning and building reliable (and therefore resilient) physical systems.
Addressing immediate priorities will help to create the conditions in which the longer-term challenges can effectively be tackled.
4.2 The Values of Uncertainty
Most of climate change’s possible impacts are projected to occur over a longer term than the other categories of risk that have been identified, introducing further uncertainty.
Experts are unable to provide much specific information, beyond stating that the future is uncertain.
Despite many efforts, current predictions can say little that is reliable about rainfall and river flows; the information available ‘is simply inadequate for most operational and design aspects of water sector decisions, and is not expected to be useful for at least another decade’ (Stakhiv, 2010:9).
A high degree of uncertainty is reported about the potential impacts of climate change in Zimbabwe (Brown et al., 2012:9).
River flows are projected to decline by up to 40%, with the Zambezi Basin worst affected.
Annual rainfall levels are projected to decline between 5–20% by 2080 in all of the country’s major river basins.
A review of different studies in Tanzania (Noel, 2012) found that predictions of the potential impact of climate change on river flows varied from a 20% reduction to a 36% increase in flows.
Coupled with widely-ranging predictions on population growth and the rate of urbanisation, this means that a key challenge for Tanzania in terms of planning adaptation strategies will be the high degree of uncertainty about its future climate’ (Noel, 2012:4).
Despite the uncertainty, some useful conclusions can be drawn.
The worst-case predictions may appear dire, but they are not necessarily critical.
Withdrawals from the Zambezi River system are currently tiny, 1 or 2% of total flow; there will always be water available for urban use given its high priority.
The potential impacts of climate change on water supply are often less serious than more immediate, man-made impacts.
Planning scenarios for water supply to the city of Cape Town found that climate change might reduce water resource availability over the 30-year planning period, but a far greater reduction is required to provide (discretionary) flows to protect the environment (DWAF, 2007).
If these priorities change, enough water will be available to meet urban needs.
Managing uncertainty is part of the job description of competent water managers as they seek to maintain supplies under conditions of (already quite extreme) short-term climate uncertainty and variability.
Their ability to do this is a fundamental determinant of the ability of societies to withstand unexpected shocks and extreme events (Brown & Lall, 2006).
While the majority of African cities do not yet have the ability to achieve this limited goal, addressing climate change cannot be considered a priority for the provision of reliable safe water supplies.
Focusing on meeting short-term needs will help to develop the capacity to deal with these longer-term uncertainties.
4.3 Ignoring Short-Term Needs May Weaken Long-Term Efforts
The argument against giving priority to building resilience to climate change does not rest solely on the need to focus on the immediate challenge of water security.
It is necessary to recognise that social preferences will place constraints on their approach (Adger et al., 2009).
It will be difficult to persuade people to devote their time, energies and limited financial resources to preparing for long-term threats while they are still grappling with today’s challenges of finding water, food and safe shelter in chaotic, poor cities.
The goal of resilience cannot be achieved without addressing those prior conditions.
Dar es Salaam reports a huge ‘development deficit’ (Kiunsi, 2013:321).
Eighty per cent of the city’s four million people live in informal settlements with very limited piped water, sewers, drains and solid waste collection.
The last City Master Plan was drawn up in 1979.
Institutional challenges are illustrated by the fact that there has been extensive commercial and residential development in areas identified by that Plan as vulnerable to flooding.
Strengthening the management of today’s climate variability should be seen as a specific contribution to addressing the potentially greater variability induced by future climate change (Muller, 2007).
5. Conclusions
Resilience as a development objective is receiving global attention, driven initially by concerns about environmental conservation in a rapidly changing world but, more recently, by the need to guide societal responses to climate change.
Countries are being encouraged to develop adaptation plans to address these challenges and explicitly to build the resilience of their societies to the expected impacts.
Caution and a more nuanced approach is needed.
The concept of resilience needs to be clarified since it has a range of relevant different meanings in the context of urban services such as water supply.
The primary determinant of the kind of societal resilience considered in a climate change context is more often institutional (in the broadest sense) than technical.
Interventions to build resilience to current ‘day-to-day’ risks may, paradoxically, often be the best strategy for the promotion of long-term societal resilience.
Such interventions will meet immediate needs while also providing a foundation from which to address the longer term challenges that may arise under conditions of climate change.
To the extent that efforts to build resilience to climate change distract from this prior focus and reduces its priority, they may actually reduce rather than contribute to urban resilience.
‘Today’s investments in water security should be seen as an explicit part of a coherent longer-term strategy for adaptation that will build a more resilient world in the future’ (Sadoff & Muller, 2009:85).
A clear commitment to improving the immediate water security of poor urban communities is also more likely to mobilise the social and political support that will be needed to achieve longer term resilience goals.