Dutch to teach SA tools for water management
WATER seemed to flow high above the heads of the people standing on the square of Amsterdam’s famous Rijksmuseum. “Spooky,” said one spectator. “It feels like I’m underwater,” said her companion.
The spectacular virtual flood created by the innovative Dutch artist Daan Roosegarde with LED light technology, software and lenses this year, was a sharp reminder to the Dutch that more than half of their country lies below sea level.
The eerie mirage of waves which he created in his Waterlicht light show flowed at the level which real water would reach were it not for the country’s elaborate water protection system – including 22 000 kilometres of dikes – that keep the North Sea and the country’s many rivers at bay.
Henk Ovink, a special envoy on water for the Netherlands, is proud of the inventiveness the Dutch have exhibited over the centuries in avoiding “wet feet”. They have built immense gates – each as long as the Eiffel Tower is high – which they can close to prevent a surge of water entering and destroying Rotterdam harbour, the biggest in Europe and sixth largest in the world.
Instead of sandbagging their coasts, as others do, they have constructed artificial islands just offshore, from which natural tides carry sand to the coast to restore beaches lost to storms. And their “Room for the River” project counter-intuitively withdraws dikes further from the flow of some rivers to allow the rivers to flow more broadly and, therefore, with less force and so less chance of breaking the dikes.
Ingenuity
With such ingenuity and long experience, the Netherlands is recognised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as the world leader in water management. Ovink himself travels the world, sharing his expertise, including as a member of US President Barack Obama’s task force to co-ordinate the rebuilding of large parts of the New York-New Jersey metropolis devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
And next week he will travel to South Africa with Dutch Prime Minister Marc Rutte who will be leading a large delegation of officials and about 65 companies in the water management, agriculture, horticulture, transport and logistics, health care and energy sectors, to boost partnerships with this country and seek business opportunities.
Minister of Water and Sanitation Nomvula Mokonyane has already accepted Ovink’s offer of Dutch expertise, research and knowledge to help develop and implement South Africa’s national water strategy. And so they will co-chair a meeting of experts from both sides during Rutte’s visit to advance implementation of the strategy.
Ovink will also meet the Cape Town and Western Cape governments to continue their collaboration on the “Two Rivers Urban Project”, which aims to develop the Liesbeek and Black rivers in Cape Town, that are now polluted and flood-prone, into attractive places that will provide housing and recreational space.
The Dutch water delegation will also visit Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban to offer their expertise in tackling many water problems such as increasing water scarcity and insecurity, and rising seas and coastal erosion because of climate change.
They will also match Dutch and South African water companies in partnerships.
Ovink said the meeting of experts, which he will co-chair, would also evaluate the Kingfisher project, through which Dutch regional water authorities have been helping South Africa to establish its equivalent “Catchment Management Agencies” (CMA) for the past ten years.
It seems illogical for the Dutch to be offering their water expertise to South Africa when their main water problem is excess while South Africa’s is scarcity. That is especially true now, with South Africa in the grip of the worst drought in many years.
Instead of sandbagging their coast… they have constructed artificial islands.
Yet Ovink says the essence of the Dutch water management system is not the designs or technology it has developed to contain the water, however ingenious they may be. It is the need for collaboration. Or governance.
In 1122, the burgers of Utrecht decided they needed to get together to protect their land from the water. Until then they had each been been trying to protect only their own land.
“But every time I protect my land, it floods my neighbour’s,” Ovink said. So they established the first Dutch regional water authority to protect their land collectively, paying taxes to elected officials to manage the water.
The Netherlands now has 23 regional water authorities covering the whole country. They have taken the lead over the centuries in responding to the rising threat of flooding. The dikes and barriers have risen ever higher. With global warming threatening to raise ocean levels between 80 centimetres and 3 metres over the next 100 years, the dikes will continue to rise too.
The CMAs, which the Netherlands is helping establish here, were envisioned in the Water Resources Act of 1998, which set out the government’s water policy. Now there are supposed to be nine of them, covering the whole country. Only two have been created, the Inkomati/Usuthu CMA (ICMA) in Mpumalanga in March 2004 and the Breede-Overberg CMA in the Western Cape in 2005.
Advice, support
South Africa’s Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS), as it is now called, in 2005 asked the associations of Dutch municipalities and water authorities to advise and support these two pilot CMAs on operational governance and management of water.
Because of the success of this co-operation, in 2012 the South African government again asked the same associations for more help, this time in establishing the other seven CMAs, especially with capacity building. This became the Kingfisher Programme. All nine CMAs were supposed to have been established by the end of this year, but that is not going to happen.
The other seven CMAs are now at various stages of realisation with the Pongola-Mzimkulu CMA in KwaZulu-Natal, the Limpopo CMA in Limpopo and the Olifants CMA in Mpumalanga/Limpopo being the most advanced.
The other four are the Vaal CMA in the centre of the country; the Orange CMA in the Free State and Northern Cape; the Mzhimvubu-Tsitsikamma CMA in the Eastern Cape and the BergOlifants CMA in the north-west Cape. Their job is to implement the National Water Resource Strategy (NWRS), published in 2004. That means managing all the water resources in their areas, above and below ground.
They allocate water to the water boards, which are responsible only for drinking water; farmers, who use 65 percent of the country’s water; and other users. They manage the quality of water and levy water tariffs from the users to finance their work. If a farmer needs more water to irrigate his crops, for instance, it is the CMA he has to ask to release more water from one of their dams.
Not enough
Harry Tolkamp, a senior strategic policy adviser for one of the Dutch regional water authorities and part of the support team, said because South Africa’s water problem was scarcity, its challenge was “the allocation to all the different users so everybody can get what they need”. Or, if there wasn’t enough, that they all at least got their fair share.
They also give advice to water users. And they protect people against floods, by building, maintaining and operating dams.
Municipalities were now responsible for sewage and water purification, but Tolkamp said the CMAs would acquire another responsibility, ensuring that money allocated to municipalities for sewage was actually used for that purpose, as municipalities too often used it for more popular and visible projects, such as building sports facilities.
The South African government asked the same associations for more help.
It was necessary to delegate the management of water from the national DWS to the regional CMAs because it was impossible for Pretoria to know what was happening on the ground countrywide, he added.
Before the CMAs, the water bills from Pretoria contained a lot more errors and so many users simply did not pay their water charges. Now the bills are much more accurate and they do pay.
“So now we have a shift from only 20 percent or 40 percent is paid and 60 percent not, to 60 percent to 80 percent paid and maybe 20 percent not. And that’s a big change,” he said.
“Because as soon as you start paying for your water services which the CMA provides, you start being an owner of the water services. You’re protecting it, also as a water user. When you don’t pay for it, it does not interest you. That may even be a shift in the policy of the people.”
With drought gripping the country, that shift in the attitude of South Africans towards greater ownership and, therefore, a greater sense of protection and preservation of the scarce resource of water, could not have come at a better time. – ANA