SA faces water crisis

2007-08-29 10:57

Cape Town - South Africa's demand for freshwater will exceed its supply by 2025, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned on Tuesday.

Urgent and immediate action must be taken to stave off massive social, economic and environmental damage, the conservation organisation said in a statement, released at the launch of the WWF Sanlam Living Water Partnership in Cape Town.

The partnership will see the insurance giant investing R15m into marine and freshwater initiatives over the next five years.

Speaking at the launch, WWF's Deon Nel, who is managing the partnership, said water was South Africa's most precious resource.

However, the dire water situation in the country did not have the prominence it should in economic and developmental planning.

"The primary policy guiding South Africa's economic development, AsgiSA, makes no mention of this key restraint to growth, or the need to carefully manage our rainfall catchments and improve the water-use efficiency of industry and agriculture," he said.

Further damage to water resources "could trigger massive social, economic and environmental damage and scupper South Africa's quest for six percent economic growth".

Also at the launch, former water affairs deputy director-general Barbara Schreiner, who left the department in March this year to become a consultant, listed the main threats to water resources in South Africa.

Chief among these was over-abstraction, particularly the theft of water by farmers, which she described as "a major problem", but declined to put a figure on its extent.

Other threats included the discharge of effluent by industry, sewage spills and chemical run-off from agriculture; the physical destruction of habitat such as wetlands; and the impact of invasive alien vegetation, which was sucking up about seven percent of the country's water supply.

Schreiner said Botswana and Namibia - both very dry countries - had more water per capita than did South Africa, whose population had reached 48.9 million in April this year.

She said the problem lay with governance of the resource rather than the resource itself.

"We can do a huge amount more with the water we have than what we are doing," she said.

- SAPA