“A university cannot survive without water,” says Professor Kirsty Carden of UCT on Day Zero

“The availability of water of acceptable quality is one of our single greatest and most urgent development constraints. So we really do need to do something at all levels across the country to address this,” said Professor Kirsty Carden, Director: Future Water Institute at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 10 October. 

She was delivering her address online during the Climate change, environmental issues and the future of the university plenary session at Universities South Africa’s (USAf’s) 3^rd Higher Education Conference in Pretoria. 

Referring to the Day Zero water emergency in Cape Town in 2018, she said: “We were catapulted into somewhat of a crisis some years ago, but what that has done is invigorate us in terms of sustainability thinking, and I’m hoping that it can give some very practical applications to other universities around South Africa and around the continent.”

Institutions dealing with water are fragmented, she said, not able to meet the capacity requirements needed and, to use a phrase she repeated often, “it’s becoming worse”. 

Now close to five million, Cape Town’s population is serviced by a series of 14 dams, six of which contribute to about 95% of the demand of the city and surrounding areas. The city’s allocation, excluding nearby towns and agriculture, is about 400 million cubic meters per annum. 

“In the 2015 to 2018 period we had a severe drought that lasted around 10 years, where we saw decreasing amounts of water running off into the supply dams. The three consecutive years of 2015, 2016 and 2017 were the lowest on record and have remained the lowest on record, making this drought a one in about 300+ year event,” she said.

Day Zero refers to the time when the then mayor of Cape Town, Patricia de Lille, announced in January 2018 that the city was 90 days away from running out of water. “The predicted date was sometime in April when we were going to hit this day zero capacity of 13.5% storage, at which stage the city would no longer be able to pipe water into people’s homes,” said Professor Carden.

They managed to escape it by about two to three weeks, largely due to severe restrictions whereby residents had to use less than 50 litres per person per day. 

During the drought, UCT put out a call out for new transdisciplinary institutes. One, formulated in 2017, was the Future Water Institute. The idea was that the institute would respond to issues of capacity around water management, infrastructure and scarcity, and also do transdisciplinary research.  

“We are represented across all faculties at UCT. A number of different departments are located on our core research group, and these range from engineering through to law, economics, public health, anthropology, architecture and the like,” she said.

Only a few core research members are paid by the institute, which Carden referred to as “soft-funded”, as it is created around early career researchers, postgraduate students, and the development of research projects.

They operate across both physical chemical water laboratories as well as experimental thought spaces. They also have field labs for pilot investigations, in different sites and on different scales.

The institute’s physical experimentation treats UCT as a living lab. The research themes it explores include:

• Sustainable water supply options – from water conservation to alternative water sources such as rainwater harvesting
• Wastewater minimisation – water recycling, use of treated wastewater, and resource recovery from urine
• Stormwater management – sustainable drainage systems and urban cooling; and 
• Design studio (architecture and landscape architecture).

“There’s a lot of work happening in the wastewater and urine space,” she said.

Professor Carden highlighted water sensitive design and how they can translate what they are doing on campus into more water sensitive thinking “to make this campus a sustainable and resilient and livable space that links into the broader Cape Town city commitments around a water sensitive city”,

During the extreme crisis, the university developed a water task team, and a water desk manned by a Future Water researcher. “Obviously communications were highly important during that time. But it was also about developing a long-term business plan based on the fact that a university cannot survive without water. We certainly could not have survived if we had to queue to go fetch water at points of distribution,” she said.

During the drought, the university community focused on:

• maintaining stored water – they have a dam and a few small reservoirs
• water savings technologies particularly in buildings and residences; and
• geohydrological surveys and borehole drilling to see where groundwater abstraction was an option.

“And there were several awareness-raising campaigns launched at scale to ensure that our 30 000 or so campus population was actually doing what it was supposed to be doing in terms of the city priorities,” she said. One was #SlowtheFlow, with posters, stickers, workshops and info on the website.

“Tied to this was a number of Future Water initiatives around getting to know how much water you use, so that the students and the staff and people visiting campus were never in any doubt as to what needed to be done in terms of saving water.” 

The #Slowthe Flow campaign led into the development of a guideline for water management strategy, submitted in October 2020. 

“It is a very well-produced organisation strategy that gives a vision for what we intend to do as part of a sustainable campus. It’s largely designed around knowing our water – this idea of monitoring usage, fixing leaks and having digital records of all water use on campus, trying to create a waterwise community through the concept of living labs and engaging with the City of Cape Town, and ensuring business continuity through being able to have a capacity to operate during periods of water scarcity,” said Professor Carden.

This water management strategy led into the broader sustainable UCT environmental strategy, which still deals with water consumption but incorporates aspects of reducing and reusing. “Recycling waste has become incredibly important,” she said. 

“There is now an intention to build green, to make sure that any new buildings are at least four-star rating, to have living laboratories across all aspects of learning and doing on campus, and there is a green campus initiative that’s very well run through students promoting activities around sustainability.”

Khusela Ikamva (securing the future) was born out of these strategies. It is a five-year programme that aims to catalyse the transformation of UCT into a sustainable campus. It has five interlinked components: 

• reducing UCT’s carbon footprint 
• sustainable water management 
• looking at the waste and wildlife nexus on the main campus, which is on the mountain and connected to the nature reserve 
• bringing waste energy and waste food into a nexus space on campus; and
• creating a community of practice. 

The project is involved in urban heat mapping with low-cost sensors and other processes to understand the importance of green spaces in urban areas. Together with the Department of Higher Education and Training, they are developing a UCT green precinct with a constructed wetland and other sustainable drainage measures, alongside a learning and training campus facility, to be run by Future Water.

They are considering designing this on a rooftop where, said Professor Carden, “we can bring in small scale experimental processes that would engage directly with students to allow them a space to not only relax, but to engage with sustainability principles”.

She said engagement was vital because a living lab approach is a user-centered process designed to allow continuous input and feedback. So they have been doing a lot of surveying and interviewing, holding workshops and focus groups, to get an idea of behaviors and perceptions around different water use. 

“We’re already beginning to see a clean campus population. People want to see a fundamental change in the way we think about sustainability on campus and how it can be co-created. If we can start to build in the cost savings and income generation and the business case to do this, then I think we’ll be well on our way to developing this sustainable campus,” said Professor Carden. 

Gillian Anstey is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.