Water users and water service providers in South Africa must start talking to each other to better manage scarce groundwater resources and avoid pumping aquifers dry.

Water Affairs Minister Edna Molewa kicked of National Water Week on Monday. In light of this, geohydrologist in SRK Consulting’s East London office, Gert Nel, highlights the need to better manage South Africa’s scarce groundwater resource.

“SA is blessed with substantial but finite groundwater resources. If we don’t properly monitor and manage the boreholes we install, then groundwater resources can easily be over-exploited and can run dry,” he says. “Then we have to repeat the whole costly process of finding other groundwater resources and accessing them, while remembering these opportunities are not limitless.”

To prevent this, Nel believes it is vital that water service providers and private users understand how much water is in the aquifers and how much off-take the aquifers can sustain.  Nel advocates the establishment of groundwater models as a scientific way of assessing how much water is available, how much is replenished through rainfall and other sources, and how much can be abstracted over a period before the sustainability of the aquifer is threatened. This gives authorities and users an overview of water availability in their area.

This, Nel says, has proved to be a good starting point for water planning strategies, although it does not solve the problem by itself. Local authorities, for example, have generally only looked at their own use when checking their abstraction levels against the flow potential of the aquifer, ignoring private use by, for example, farms which are not supplied by local authorities. This demands greater co-operation between municipalities and the agricultural sector.

The Department of Water Affairs, as the overall custodian of the country’s water resources, is legally empowered to authorise water use. However, before it authorises water use, it would have to take into account other abstractions in the area. The problem is that many private users do not apply for these authorisations, so the department may not be fully aware of how much water is being taken from any specific area. “When the municipality applies for a water use authorisation in the same area, it is very likely that it will be granted, as the department must assume from its records that there is limited abstraction by private users in the area.”

Nel says the department is still working to get all large private users to register their boreholes and pumping levels – an initiative they began pushing in the 1980s. “Water Affairs needs this information; if there is large-scale private abstraction in an area where the municipality also needs groundwater, there is always going to be the danger of depletion. And when a municipality runs out of water, the first place they turn to is Water Affairs; while it’s not the department’s responsibility, it often becomes their problem. Implementing a groundwater model as part of a groundwater management strategy, and on-going monitoring, would help avoid this problem.”

Nel points to the further issue of skills and financial capacity at local level. He believes local municipalities have traditionally not focused on the protection of aquifers as this requires extra funding and certain scientific skills for monitoring and management. Specialist engineering skills can be brought in to help tackle these important tasks, but funding these specialised inputs continues to be a challenge.