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Every Drop Counts
Urban Water Management
Research Project
Urban water management – and the impacts that rapid population growth, industrialisation and climate change are having
on it – is gaining increasing attention worldwide.
In South Africa, cities are under pressure to respond not
only to the challenges of water availability and quality,
but also to economic transformation and social division.
New solutions for improving the sustainability of cities
need to be found, including the development of tools to
guide decision-makers. Several benchmarking initiatives
have been implemented in the South African water
sector – mostly in terms of performance measurement
of specific water services for regulatory purposes – but
none provide an integrated analysis to enable a deeper
understanding of sustainability.
The research undertaken by Dr Kirsty Carden and
Professor Neil Armitage focused on using a systems
approach to create an understanding of, and
measurement of the potential for, sustainability in
a South African urban water context. The research
resulted in the development and evaluation of a
composite index, the Sustainability Index for
Integrated Urban Water Management (SIUWM). The
first step involved compiling a vision of sustainability
for the South African water sector, and expanding
it into a sustainability framework to help identify
suitable indicators for the assessment process, as
well as those which link with existing measurement
initiatives. Key performance indicator results from the
Department of Water Affairs’ Regulatory Performance
Management System and the Blue Drop/Green Drop
schemes were used as partial input to the SIUWM,
and scores were computed for the nine member cities
of the South African Cities Network. The SIUWM links
the results from the regulatory systems with a broader
sustainability assessment process to provide a more
detailed analysis which can be used to establish
goals and inform strategic processes to leverage
support for improved water services. In this way, the
connections that link the different aspects of urban
water management can be used to generate a greater
awareness of the underlying issues by key decision
makers and thus guide appropriate action.