JOHANNESBURG – Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane  has been accused of turning a blind eye to violations of the province’s environmental laws.

She has been urged to intervene to avoid a full blown water pollution crisis in the province.

It is alleged that the premier is aware that more than  a dozen mining companies, . . . → Read More: Gauteng ‘ignoring water crisis’]]> MUSA MOHAMED

JOHANNESBURG – Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane  has been accused of turning a blind eye to violations of the province’s environmental laws.

South Africa is experiencing severe water stress, with demand exceeding supply, and the situation is expected to worsen due to climate change, population growth and changes in consumption patterns.

It has been estimated that more than 98% of the available water resources in South Africa have already been allocated to different users. . . . → Read More: Freshwater; Integrated Catchment Management]]> WWF South Africa

South Africa is experiencing severe water stress, with demand exceeding supply, and the situation is expected to worsen due to climate change, population growth and changes in consumption patterns.

It has been estimated that more than 98% of the available water resources in South Africa have already been allocated to different users. The most recent water quantity studies have shown that South Africa’s water resources are much less than previously thought. The worsening water crisis in South Africa is going to have dire consequences on the environment, the economy, and the livelihood of South Africans. With dwindling water resources the future of large scale water users such as agriculture and mining, which form the backbone of South Africa’s economy, will be in jeopardy.

There is an urgent need to implement pragmatic approaches to water resources management that will optimally harness South Africa’s limited water resources. The implementation of  integrated catchment management (ICM) strategies that take full cognisance of the environmental, social and economic dimension to water resource management is therefore critical in South Africa. ICM approaches seek to develop pragmatic solutions to water resource management that will optimally protect the scarce water resources and lead to economic growth and development.

To implement the principles of integrated catchment management requires effective partnerships between local communities, government, and the private sector. There is a need to capacitate the key role players to have the appropriate knowledge and skills to undertake natural resource management. Effective institutional arrangements will also need to put in place to foster stewardship in water resource management.

The ICM Programme undertakes freshwater conservation in all three key strategic areas of:-
Water Security
Water Conservation
Water stewardship

You can make a difference; big or small. From re-cycling grey water to harvesting your own rainwater. Water conservation is a shared responsibility.

While the amount of freshwater on the planet has remained fairly constant over time—continually recycled through the atmosphere and back into our cups—the population has exploded. This means that . . . → Read More: A Clean Water Crisis]]>

The water you drink today has likely been around in one form or another since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.

While the amount of freshwater on the planet has remained fairly constant over time—continually recycled through the atmosphere and back into our cups—the population has exploded. This means that every year competition for a clean, copious supply of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and sustaining life intensifies.

Water scarcity is an abstract concept to many and a stark reality for others. It is the result of myriad environmental, political, economic, and social forces.

Freshwater makes up a very small fraction of all water on the planet. While nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh. The rest is saline and ocean-based. Even then, just 1 percent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields. In essence, only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its 6.8 billion people.

Due to geography, climate, engineering, regulation, and competition for resources, some regions seem relatively flush with freshwater, while others face drought and debilitating pollution. In much of the developing world, clean water is either hard to come by or a commodity that requires laborious work or significant currency to obtain.

Water Is Life

Wherever they are, people need water to survive. Not only is the human body 60 percent water, the resource is also essential for producing food, clothing, and computers, moving our waste stream, and keeping us and the environment healthy.

Unfortunately, humans have proved to be inefficient water users. (The average hamburger takes 2,400 liters of water to produce, and many water-intensive crops, such as cotton, are grown in arid regions.)

According to the United Nations, water use has grown at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century. By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, with two-thirds of the world’s population living in water-stressed regions as a result of use, growth, and climate change.

The challenge we face now is how to effectively conserve, manage, and distribute the water we have. Learn how you can make a difference by reducing your water footprint and getting involved with local and global water conservation and advocacy efforts.

Water Affairs has red-flagged 14 municipalities in seven provinces, warning residents of numerous small rural towns in these areas not to drink untreated tap water.

The 2012 Blue Drop Report, released by Water Affairs Minister Edna Molewa yesterday, said the warning remains in place until the management of . . . → Read More: Red flag for 14 municipalities]]> May 8 2012 at 03:08pm
By SAPA

Water Affairs has red-flagged 14 municipalities in seven provinces, warning residents of numerous small rural towns in these areas not to drink untreated tap water.

Archaeologists have found a stunning array of 1,200-year-old Maya paintings in a room that appears to have been a workshop for calendar scribes and priests, with numerical markings on the wall that denote intervals of time well beyond the controversial cycle that runs out this December.

For years, prophets of doom have . . . → Read More: Maya calendar workshop documents time beyond 2012]]> By Alan Boyle

Archaeologists have found a stunning array of 1,200-year-old Maya paintings in a room that appears to have been a workshop for calendar scribes and priests, with numerical markings on the wall that denote intervals of time well beyond the controversial cycle that runs out this December.

For years, prophets of doom have been saying that we’re in for an apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012, because that marks the end of the Maya “Long Count” calendar, which was based on a cycle of 13 intervals known as “baktuns,” each lasting 144,000 days. But the researchers behind the latest find, detailed in the journal Science and an upcoming issue of National Geographic, say the writing on the wall runs counter to that bogus belief.

“It’s very clear that the 2012 date, this end of 13 baktuns, while important, was turning the page,” David Stuart, an expert on Maya hieroglyphs at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters today. “Baktun 14 was going to be coming, and Baktun 15 and Baktun 16. … The Maya calendar is going to keep going, and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future.”

The current focus of the research project, led by Boston University’s William Saturno, is a 6-by-6-foot room situated beneath a mound at the Xultun archaeological site in Guatemala’s Peten region. Maxwell Chamberlain, a BU student participating in the excavations there, happened to notice a poorly preserved wall protruding from a trench that was previously dug by looters, with the hints of a painting on the plaster.

Saturno said he didn’t think there’d be much to the wall, but “I felt we had a responsibility to find out at the very least how large this room was.”

When archaeologists worked their way into the mound, they were amazed to find that it was a richly decorated room from the Classic Maya period, dating back to roughly the year 800. One niche was adorned with the faded picture of a Maya king, wearing a blue-feathered headdress and holding a white scepter. The picture of a scribe holding a stylus, perhaps the son or brother of the king, was painted nearby with the label “Younger Brother Obsidian.” Another wall showed a row of three stylized black figures, with one bearing the hieroglyphic name “Older Brother Obsidian.”

Rows of numbers and hieroglyphs were painted on yet another wall. In fact, it appeared that the wall had been plastered over repeatedly and covered with new sets of figures. “What these are giving us are time spans,” Stuart said. “Not so much dates, but Maya notations of elapsed time.”

Stuart said some sets of numbers denoted lunar cycles of 177 or 178 days, along with the sign for a patron god that was associated with each cycle. “This was, we think, a calculator for a Maya priest, an astronomer, to figure out lunar ages,” he said.

In a news release, Saturno said this represents the first look at “what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community.”

“It’s like an episode of TV’s ‘Big Bang Theory,’ a geek math problem and they’re painting it on the wall,” Saturno said. “They seem to be using it like a blackboard.”

In addition to lunar cycles, the calculations on the wall could relate to the periods of Venus, Mercury and Mars, the researchers reported. Stuart said such calculations could have come into play for predicting eclipses. He imagined that there might be “one or more, maybe two or three of these astronomers or calendar priests working, sitting there on a workbench and writing these notations on the wall.”

One array of numbers would be particularly intriguing to doomsday debunkers: lists that appear to denote wide ranges of accumulated time, including a 17-baktun period. “There was a lot more to the Maya calendar than just 13 baktuns,” Stuart observed. Seventeen baktuns would stand for about 6,700 years, which is much longer than the 13-baktun cycle of 5,125 years. However, Stuart cautioned that the time notation shouldn’t be read as specifying a date that’s farther in the future than Dec. 21.

“It may just be that this is a mathematical number that they find interesting, kind of floating in time,” he told me. “But it certainly is expressing a capacity of time. If they were calculating something from their time period, around 800 A.D., yeah, this would have gone way beyond 2012. But again, we’re not sure exactly what the base of the calculation is.”

Saturno said archaeologists have been trying to get out the word that the end of the Maya culture’s 13-baktun “Long Count” calendar didn’t signify the end of the world, but merely a turnover to the next cycle in a potentially infinite series — like going from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1 on a modern calendar, or turning the odometer on a car over from 99999.9 to 00000.0.

“If someone is a hard-core believer that the world is going to end in 2012, no painting is going to convince them otherwise,” he said. “The only thing that can convince them otherwise is waiting until Dec. 22, 2012 — which fortunately for all of us isn’t that far away.”
Saturno and his colleagues plan to be studying the Xultun site long after that time. He said the workshop was apparently part of a residential compound that had been razed over the ages; the workshop was preserved because it was filled in with material rather than smashed down from above. That could suggest that the room was recognized as a special place even when it was abandoned. Research into the room and its purpose is continuing, Saturno said.

In its day, Xultun apparently served as one of the major ceremonial cities for the Classic Maya civilization — and yet it’s just barely been explored, in part because the area is so remote.

“We have probably 99.9 percent of Xultun left to explore,” Saturno said. “We’re going to be working on it probably for many decades to come. … Four or five years in to the research project, we have yet to determine its actual boundaries — so my estimate may be off. We may have 99.99 percent left to excavate.”

National Geographic

And you will most definitely need water for ever after – please conserve water. Use only what you need or there won’t be enough. Recycle grey water and harvest your own rain water. Make a difference. You can.

South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal countries. After a successful fight against racial apartheid, it is no surprise that the sphere of economic rights is also being contested. With liberation from many government regulations, neoliberal water industry actors began pushing for deregulation and privatization. Intense grassroots critiques of water . . . → Read More: The battle over water in South Africa]]> By Patrick Bond

South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal countries. After a successful fight against racial apartheid, it is no surprise that the sphere of economic rights is also being contested. With liberation from many government regulations, neoliberal water industry actors began pushing for deregulation and privatization. Intense grassroots critiques of water disconnections, pre-paid meters and privatisation emerged from many communities, including the Johannesburg townships of Soweto and Orange Farm.

Municipalities have begun working to turn debt?ridden and inefficient water utilities into profitable operations that could attract private investment. A handful have already granted long?term management concessions to private multinationals…

‘Privatisation is a new kind of apartheid,’ said Richard Mokolo, leader of the Crisis Water Committee, which was formed to resist the privatisation effort in a township called Orange Farm, 25 miles south of Johannesburg. ‘Apartheid separated whites from blacks. Privatisation separates the rich from the poor.’

South African officials say the change in policies has helped expand water services to 8 million of 13 million people who did not have water when apartheid ended. But the statistics have not added up to progress in many poor communities, which have won their first reliable water services but now struggle to pay for them.

The issue of access to services has become an explosive new cause in the same urban townships and rural squatter camps that were principal battlegrounds in the fight against apartheid. During the World Summit on Sustainable Development thousands marched from the tin shacks of Alexandra past the elegant mansions of Sandton to protest, among other things, water and electricity cutoffs and evictions. Their cry: ‘Water for the thirsty. Light for the people. Homes for the homeless…’

Leaders in sprawling townships including Soweto, Alexandra and Orange Farm have encouraged people not to pay electricity and water bills. They have organised teams of bootleg plumbers and electricians to reconnect utilities when they are cut off. Political rallies and demonstrations have turned into street fights.

On the dirt streets of Orange Farm, where state?of?the?art water meters have been installed in front of lopsided tin shacks, people foresee a human disaster. Because of its location, it is known as the ‘deep south.’ However, it seems a fitting nickname in other ways.
Officials at Johannesburg Water acknowledged that in communities like these, billing people for water has been like squeezing water from a stone. In addition to the limited resources, a culture of nonpayment lingers from the years when people refused to pay utility bills, usually a flat fee for water and electricity, in support of boycotts against the apartheid regime.

Africa’s worst-ever recorded cholera outbreak can be traced to an August 2000 decision to cut water to people who were not paying a KwaZulu-Natal regional water board.

After the African National Congress promised free basic water supplies in December 2000, during a municipal election campaign, the same bureaucrats responsible for water disconnections began redesigning the water tariffs. In July 2001, revised price schedules provided a very small free lifeline, 6 000 litres per household per month, followed by a very steep, convex curve , such that the next consumption block becomes unaffordable, leading to even higher rates of water disconnections in many settings. The 6 000 litres represent just two toilet flushes a day per person for a household of eight, for those lucky enough to have flush toilets. It leaves no additional water to drink, wash with, clean clothes or for any other household purposes.

To fully comprehend the water apartheid problem requires us to travel from Johannesburg’s local circumstances up to the global scale to consider neoliberal capitalism’s basic processes, and then back to local struggles. In general, the obvious reason for squeezing water supply to the poor is to keep prices for rich people and big business as low as possible. In this sense, the logic of the Washington Consensus was superimposed upon the ANC’s free water policy.

Services are the ‘greatest challenge’ to living a decent life in Johannesburg. There is only one recent (2000) official survey that systematically measures citizen satisfaction with water services, and it is not flattering: ‘There is a strong indication that residents from all areas are beginning to feel a heightened sense of frustration and decreased sense of control that they have over their communities and the city due to perceptions of the council’s decreasing ability to manage the services under their jurisdiction.’  Among their top five complaints, residents listed electricity (48%), water (42%) and toilets (33%) as three of the five worst problems. The other two were the city’s failure to create jobs and maintain health clinics.

The 2000-03 move to commodify Johannesburg’s water through outsourcing to an international water corporation brought with it several new profitable techniques: revised tariffs that appeared to provide free water, but didn’t; pre-paid meters aimed at self-disconnections; and no-flush sanitation of an appallingly low, gender-biased standard. But because Johannesburg workers and poor people, especially women, are amongst the most politicized in Africa, protest was inevitable. In 2006, Suez may well find that the failure to have its contract with Johannesburg renewed is the price it pays for imposing neoliberalism on angry, desperate communities, whose vision of a better life includes water as a human right, not a commodity.

The first is the world’s commitment to “traditional” power sources, in which trillions of dollars have been invested – coal, hydrocarbons, and for the past five decades, nuclear.

This fixation leave many renewable energy projects starved for investment, though as oil prices continue to rise . . . → Read More: South Africa to use Oceanic Currents for 24/7 Uninterrupted Renewable Energy]]> By John Daly| Tue, 08 May 2012 04:46 | 2

The first is the world’s commitment to “traditional” power sources, in which trillions of dollars have been invested – coal, hydrocarbons, and for the past five decades, nuclear.

Former Water Affairs director- general and visiting professor at the Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management Mike Muller told delegates that “a . . . → Read More: Water crisis by 2020]]> SIPHO MASONDO

South Africa faces a water crisis and could start having critical shortages as early as 2020, experts told the inaugural South African Water and Energy Forum in Johannesburg.

Former Water Affairs director- general and visiting professor at the Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management Mike Muller told delegates that “a crisis is looming … If we don’t panic now and take action now, we will be in a crisis by 2020.”

Metropolitan municipalities including eThekwini, Nelson Mandela Bay, and the City of Johannesburg, will be the first to be hit by shortages.

The shortages, Muller said, will largely be due to water demand outstripping supply, and to a lesser extent by poor water quality as municipal infrastructure deteriorates.

Other contributing factors include leaking pipes and the theft of water for agricultural purposes by farmers along the Vaal River.

“Good water management is very important for growth and development,” said Muller.

“South Africa will not run out of water, but the next drought will see supply cuts. New work must start now.”

He urged the government and municipalities to start building water infrastructure immediately.

Business Leadership South Africa CEO Michael Spicer said South Africa had sophisticated legislation and institutions, but was failing to implement those pieces of legislation.

SA Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Neren Rau said the crisis was “now”.

“Government has to take the lead. We don’t believe this is being taken seriously.”

Times Live

14 February, 2011

It’s more than a year later now ….. Have you started to conserve water yet? Are you re-cycling your grey water? Harvesting your own rainwater?