KEEPING THE TAPS RUNNING: 
HOW CAPE TOWN AVERTED 'DAY ZERO,' 2017 - 2018

SYNOPSIS
In 2017, Cape Town, South Africa, was on a countdown to disaster. An unprecedented and wholly unforeseen third consecutive year of drought threatened to cut off water to the city's four million citizens. Faced with the prospect of running dangerously low on potable water, local officials raced against time to avert "Day Zero"-the date on which they would have to shut off drinking water to most businesses and homes in the city. Cape Town's government responded effectively to the fast-worsening and potentially cataclysmic situation. Key to the effort was a broad, multipronged information campaign that overcame skepticism and enlisted the support of a socially and economically diverse citizenry as well as private companies. Combined with other measures such as improving data management and upgrading technology, the strategy averted disaster. By the time the drought eased in 2018, Capetonians had cut their water usage by nearly 60% from 2015 levels. With each resident using little more than 50 liters per day, Cape Town achieved one of the lowest per capita water consumption rates of any major city in the world. The success set a benchmark for cities around the world that confront the uncertainties of a shifting global climate.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2018. Case published February 2019.



INTRODUCTION
    In the waning days of 2017, temperatures rose as summer returned to Cape Town, South Africa, a seaside city caught in the grip of a devastating drought. The Newlands Spring-a public water collection point fed by runoff from Table Mountain, Cape Town's iconic backdrop-became more popular than the city's famous sandy beaches. In the midst of a three-year drought, and with 2017 rainfall the lowest since recordkeeping began in 1928, thousands of city residents flocked to Newlands Spring every day. After standing in line for as long as two hours, they filled containers with as much water as they could carry to supplement the amount of municipal drinking water each resident could use at home without incurring steep surcharges.
    As temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), tempers flared and fistfights broke out. The city's safety and security department closed the site and moved the collection location to a fenced area that had a 24-hour security center.1 Capetonians feared that the jostling for water at Newlands might be a taste of what was to come. 
    "At the end of the 2017 winter [Southern Hemisphere winters run from June through August], it was clear that we were in a crisis situation, with dams at only 38%," recalled Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson, who worked as a civil engineer for 20 years before being elected to the City Council.
    Cape Town faced the looming prospect of "Day Zero"-the date when the six reservoirs that provided nearly all of the city's water would be down to only 13.5% of their storage capacity. If that day arrived, the municipality would have to shut down water service to most neighborhoods, and residents would be allowed to draw no more than 25 liters per person each day from designated collection points-far less than the existing allotment and only a fraction of the amount required for daily personal needs. In a 2010 report, the World Health Organization and the United Nations had concluded that between 50 and 100 liters of water per person per day were essential to meet basic needs.2 
    Worse still, if winter rains in 2018 failed again or came too late, even such strict rationing could not guarantee that reservoir levels wouldn't drop below 10%-at which point the entire supply system could close down.
    In addition to creating a public health danger, the crisis raised concerns about public order based on the prospect of thousands of citizens jostling in line at various sites every day to collect drinking water. Cape Town already was one of the world's most violent cities, with a murder rate in 2017 of 62.3 per 100,000 people-2.1 times higher than Johannesburg's, 10.2 times higher than Nairobi's, and 18 times higher than New York City's.
    As Cape Town entered an unprecedented third year of drought in 2017, the City Council, led by Mayor Patricia de Lille and her deputy, Neilson-along with Xanthea Limberg, the elected councilor appointed by the mayor to head the water and sanitation department-confronted a dire situation that threatened to become catastrophic. The need was obvious: to assure adequate water to a thirsty population during a historic drought, and to do so in an exceedingly tight time frame. But how? Get more water from somewhere (augmentation)? Or try to slow consumption to a trickle?
   The first approach raised issues of feasibility, cost, and sustainability, while the second would require citizens to upend their ways of life and could damage the city's long-term reputation as a tourist destination. With water levels dropping on a daily basis, Cape Town's leaders had to race against time to design and implement a response.
   
THE CHALLENGE
    In some ways, Cape Town's government created one of its own greatest challenges. By failing to move quickly and forcefully when the drought began in 2015, it created a severe time crunch. Throughout that year and the next, Cape Town had imposed relatively mild water restrictions and launched no significant augmentation projects. 
    However, at the beginning of the drought, it had been impossible to predict that the situation would evolve into the most severe water crisis Cape Town had ever faced. As recently as 2014, the city's six reservoirs were overflowing after three years of above-average rains. "And as late as June 2017, the South African Weather Service was forecasting a wetter-than-average year up to September," explained Gisela Kaiser, Cape Town's executive director for water and utility services. "We [only] hit full panic stations by the end of the hydrological year in October 2017, when dam levels were down to 38%," after the weather service's optimistic forecasts failed to materialize.
    According to the city's water and sanitation department, the probability of three consecutive years of rainfall as low as the 2015 to 2017 levels amounted to a 1-in-590-year event3-well beyond anything planners could have reasonably anticipated. (See text box 1 and figure 1). 

Box 1. A drought unlike any other
Until 1921, Cape Town’s main source of water was a series of small reservoirs along the spring-fed streams flowing from Table Mountain. As the population grew during the 20th century, the government built the six dams further afield that, by 2015, made up the city’s supply system.
But the scale of the drought that started in 2015 was unlike any in living memory and overwhelmed the supply system. Statistics showed that in 2015 and 2016, the city’s six reservoirs recorded annual rainfall inflows of slightly over half the long-term average of 711 million cubic meters. And in 2017, the annual inflow plummeted to only a third of the average. Individually, the 2015 and 2017 rainfall seasons were the lowest annual totals ever recorded.  
Given that kind of calculation, critics were hard-pressed to lay blame for the crisis on a lack of foresight by Cape Town planners. Piotr Wolski, a hydro-climatologist at the University of Cape Town, wrote in August 2017, “The low rainfall total of the three-year event [is] very, very rare. … The results somewhat exonerate the Cape’s government, as well as the water engineers designing Cape Town’s water supply system, from blame for the current water crisis.”2 
Wolski added that under normal conditions the Western Cape supply system—from which Cape Town drew its water— “runs at 98% assurance levels, which means that once every 50 years it may not provide the full supply [thereby making water restrictions or augmentation necessary]. This is in line with global standards.” While the system was thus designed for a once-in-50-year event, the magnitude of the drought that beset the dams from 2015 “seem to be well beyond what one usually plans for,” Wolski concluded.3

1 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 1, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf.
2 Piotr Wolski, “How severe is the drought?,” University of Cape Town, August 31, 2017, accessed December 10, 2018; https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2017-08-31-how-severe-is-the-droughta.
3 Ibid. 

    Although the city had gradually tightened water restrictions throughout 2016, in early October 2017 residents collectively still used more than 600 million liters of water per day-well above the then-current target of 500 million liters.4 It would take an extraordinary effort to reach the daily water consumption target of 450 million liters that planners envisioned. Such a target would leave each resident with only 50 liters per day for personal use-the amount of water used in a two-and-a-half-minute shower (flushing a toilet used another nine liters, while a full load of laundry used 70 liters). Many commercial users also faced stringent targets.
    The time crunch that confronted Cape Town's planners in mid-to-late 2017 affected their thinking at every turn: the clock was rapidly counting down toward a yet-undetermined Day Zero.
    Additional challenges arose from past and current planning, politics, and other factors. First was the city's near-exclusive reliance on surface water. Although a 2007 conservation and demand-management strategy had called for the city to explore the possibility of diversifying and expanding its supply through costly measures such as seawater desalination, water reuse, or deep-well drilling,5 the government had not launched any significant augmentation projects. As a result, in 2015 Cape Town still drew 99.6% of its water supply from the six reservoirs located in different parts of the Western Cape province, leaving it vulnerable to fluctuating rainfall. If the city in 2017 decided to bolster its water supply to relieve the crisis, doing so would require both fast action and a lot of money.
    But it was not up to Cape Town alone to augment supply and manage demand. Under South Africa's constitutional framework, the national Department of Water and Sanitation was responsible for managing and supplying bulk water to municipalities as well as agricultural users. Municipalities like Cape Town were then responsible for ensuring that the water reached individual properties located within their boundaries-a process known as reticulation.
    The national government failed to deliver on its responsibilities, however, because mismanagement and corruption at the national water department resulted in neglect of crucial infrastructure and weak enforcement of restrictions on agricultural users. As Cape Town's drought worsened in early 2017, officials from the national treasury acknowledged that "internal controls, project management and contract management" had collapsed within the national Department of Water and Sanitation.6 The department had accumulated huge debts and was unable even to pay the contractors it had hired.7 As a result, the Western Cape's catchment areas had become overgrown with alien invasive plant species. And canals that were supposed to transport water from nearby rivers to the Voëlvlei dam-the second biggest in the system-were cracked and clogged with sand, causing extensive water losses. 
    Politics further complicated the challenge of coordinating effectively with the national department to improve maintenance and planning: the African National Congress (ANC) controlled the national government, while the rival Democratic Alliance (DA) governed the Western Cape province and Cape Town.
    Along with the time crunch, reliance on a single supply source, and a lack of support from the national government, a fourth contextual challenge was the distribution of Cape Town's populace and its diversity.
    Usage statistics showed that households in formal neighborhoods consumed 65% of Cape Town's water, while residents living in informal settlements-usually comprising makeshift shacks on land that was not formally registered-accounted for just 3.6% of usage, mostly drawn from communal standpipes. Retail businesses and offices accounted for 12.8%, government buildings for 7.1%, and industry for 4.2%; consumers classified as "other" used the remaining 7.3%.8
    In 2017, Cape Town had 1.05 million formal households and 157,000 informal ones.9 The usage data made it clear that any government demand-reduction strategy would have to focus on users who lived in formal residential areas. But any such effort also would have to communicate effectively with Cape Town's diverse citizenry. Although most residents spoke English as a second language, Afrikaans was the most widely used first language (34.9%) in the city, followed by isiXhosa at 29.2% and English at 27.8%.10 And although Cape Town was the least economically unequal of South Africa's big cities and had the lowest unemployment rate, it still had a very high Gini coefficient score of 0.61 (where 0 indicates perfect income equality and 1 indicates perfect inequality),11 and unemployment stood at 21.7%.12
    The list of delivery challenges did not end there. Paradoxically, the extent of Cape Town's challenge in 2017 reflected in large part the city's past success in managing water usage (as opposed to bolstering supply). Through the measures put in place under the 2007 water conservation and demand management strategy, including separate programs to quickly repair leaks, replace pipelines, and maintain mild water restrictions even during wet years like 2014, the city had prevented any rise in its water consumption for more than a decade despite a 30% increase in population.13 
    According to Peter Flower, Cape Town's director of water and sanitation, "the net effect was that the per capita consumption of Cape Town reduced from about 330 liters per person per day in 1998 to about 220 liters in 2014." As a result, "there was no longer that much fat to save through more severe restrictions. The low-hanging fruit had already been picked," Flower said. (See text box 2).

Box 2. The 2007 water conservation and demand-management strategy
Following the adoption of the 2007 water strategy, the municipal government began thinking more systematically about conservation measures. “At the turn of the 21st century, use was rising by about 4% per annum,” Flower said. “Options for new dams at a reasonable cost and distance were becoming limited. Water therefore needed to be used more efficiently…so the concept of a reconciliation strategy was developed to reconcile water supply and demand.”
As a result, Cape Town had never completely lifted water restrictions following the end of the previous drought in 2005. For more than a decade and despite good rains, the municipal government had kept the mild level 1 water restrictions that aimed to save 10% of the total supply the national government allocated to the city. For example, level 1 restrictions allowed the use of potable water for irrigating gardens or parks, but only before 10 a.m. and after 5 p.m., when evaporation was lower.  It also banned the installation of automatic flush urinals in new buildings, and did not allow residents to clean paved surfaces with municipal drinking water.2 
The other key element in the usage-reduction strategy was a threefold program to reduce water losses through leaks and burst pipes. First, when advanced pressure management devices were in use, they reduced pressure in the pipes during off-peak times, minimizing wear and tear that led to leaks. Second, a leak repair project launched in 2008 offered people in indigent households—who received 6,000 liters of free water per month but struggled to pay when they exceeded that threshold—the opportunity to have their water debts written off in exchange for allowing the city to fix any leaks on their properties and install a water management device that would keep their monthly use below the 6,000 liters guaranteed them without charge. A third element focused on proactively replacing old pipes, and reacting more rapidly to leaks. 
Under the loss-reduction program, the city had replaced 266 kilometers of the most degraded pipes between July 2011 and June 2015, repaired leaks at more than 57,000 properties, and installed more than 32,000 water management devices.3 Between 2007 and 2015, the pressure management project—which strategically reduced water pressure at certain times—also saved nearly 22 billion liters of water.4 Between 2010 and 2015, pressure reduction reduced the rate at which pipes burst to 24 per 100 kilometers from 62 in 2010.5 It reduced the share of Cape Town’s total reticulated water lost due to leaks to 17%—significantly better than the 37% average for South Africa6 and lower than the 20%-30% range found in most countries.7
While the demand-management and loss-reduction components of the 2007 strategy proved successful, there had been little movement to implement the strategy’s call for simultaneously expanding augmentation. “Due to the success that the city achieved in keeping demand flat for 15 years, many of the augmentation implementation dates were moved [back],” Flower said. “They were not deemed to be required, given the reduced demand projections and the high dam levels. There was little political appetite for large infrastructure expenditure with the dams full.”

  City of Cape Town: Approved Level 1 Water Restrictions, November 1, 2005, December 12, 2018; http://royalascot.co.za/documents/Water-Restrictions-1-11-2005.pdf. 
2 Ibid.  
3 Patricia de Lille, “Fifteen years on, Cape Town uses same volume of water,” City Press, November 25, 2011, accessed December 13, 2018; https://city-press.news24.com/Voices/fifteen-years-on-cape-town-uses-same-volume-of-water-20151120. 
4 Ibid. 
5 Ibid.. 
6 Jason Norwood-Young and Marelise van der Merwe, “State of the dams: The Cape’s water supply at a glance,” Daily Maverick, November 3, 2017, accessed December 13, 2018; https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-11-03-state-of-the-dams-the-capes-water-supply-at-a-glance/. 
7 Steven Renzetti and Diane Dupont, “Buried Treasure: The Economics of Leak Detection and Water Loss Prevention in Ontario,” Environmental Sustainability Research Network Working Paper, 2013, accessed December 13, 2018; https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/62644197.pdf.


    The city could help citizens manage their water use in several ways, but each approach came with its own set of constraints. A lack of easily accessible and publicly available data presented another hurdle to any attempt to further reduce consumption. Not only did the city need data to track water consumption and dam levels on a continuous basis, but it also had to find ways to share the data and other information so that residents and the media could track progress as the situation evolved. "Four-hundred-fifty million liters per day was an ambitious target, but on a macro level it meant nothing to the people who will actually be saving," said Doug Lockhart, managing partner at Hero Communications, which worked with the city on its messaging campaigns. "We needed to use data to quantify water for every resident's personal use. ... We had to show that if you flushed a toilet, that's nine liters down the drain. We had to get them to measure before they could better manage water."
    The city's water department could also ramp up its use of pressure-management technology to reduce wastage through leaks and excessive use. Fortunately, it had already invested heavily in the rollout of advanced pressure-management devices. In 2002, it had opened the world's biggest advanced pressure-management station in the neighborhood of Khayelitsha, about 20 kilometers from the city center. The Khayelitsha station digitally measured water pressure and flow rates, and automatically opened and closed valves to keep the pressure within specified parameters. 
    By raising pressure during peak times and reducing pressure during off-peak times, digital pressure management was less disruptive than manually closing valves to reduce pressure, and the tactic helped build public confidence in the water department's ability to manage reticulation. Linda Siyengo, an engineer in the demand-management directorate, added that the digital devices "paid for themselves within a matter of months" because lower pressure, especially at night, meant that less water spilled from undetected leaks. By 2017, the city had added dozens of smaller stations. 
    Adjusting prices or cost was another a possible tool. The most pressing challenge was to price water more accurately, because the price was heavily subsidized and did not reflect the full cost of its provision.14 South Africa's 1996 constitution designated access to "sufficient water" as a human right, effectively requiring municipalities to reticulate water to poor households free of charge.15 Like many other municipalities, Cape Town kept a register of indigent households, each of which was eligible to receive 6,000 liters of free water per month. In 2017, the list contained about 268,000 households.16 
    The hitch was that during the 2000s, the city had gone a step farther by additionally providing 6,000 liters of water per month free to all households. While the move was partly motivated by the fact that the indigent register was incomplete and that it was difficult and costly to collect water-use charges, or tariffs, in informal neighborhoods where many people relied on communal standpipes, the City Council also regarded it as politically advantageous to provide some free water to all households. The downside, according to Limberg, the elected city councilor in charge of water and sanitation, was that "people got accustomed to water costing next to nothing." 
    In the midst of the crisis, the city had to muster the political will to increase water tariffs significantly for users who could afford to pay, while preserving the provision of free water to indigent households. Limberg flagged a further complication: South Africa's Municipal Finance Management Act stipulated that municipalities could set water tariffs only once per year when adopting the annual budget. "For the rest of the year, the law says you can't touch the tariffs," she said. The result was that, even as the city progressively tightened water restrictions during 2017, tariffs could not increase in tandem. "Many people just didn't comply because the tougher restrictions weren't impacting them financially." 
    While higher tariffs would be a key element in enforcing better compliance from residents, the city also had to identify properties with leaking pipes or where residents simply refused to stop wasting water. In the latter case, it had to enact tough new penalties to discourage waste. At the same time, the city also had to use higher tariffs to generate funding for the various response measures. In cases where the existing budget for the water and sanitation department was inadequate, it had to look for outside funding or reprioritize spending away from other programs. 
    Finally, if all of its other measures did not succeed in averting Day Zero, Cape Town needed a plan for how to distribute water to four million people when dam levels sank to 13.5% and most taps shut off. 
   
FRAMING A RESPONSE
    Droughts were not uncommon in Cape Town, which had a Mediterranean climate that featured brief, wet winters and long, dry summers. The one that began in 2015 followed others in 2003 and 2004, and was the seventh since 1928. 
    Following long-established practices, the city responded to the latest drought by gradually tightening water restrictions, raising them to level 2 on January 1, 2016, from level 1, which had been in place continuously since the end of the last drought in 2005. The slightly more stringent rules limited watering of gardens and other outside spaces to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays before 9 a.m. and after 4 p.m.; required all swimming pools to be covered when not in use; and disallowed automatic pool top-up systems.
    In November 2016, after winter storms failed to deliver substantially higher rainfall than the previous year's, the city tightened its restrictions to level 3, aiming for a 30% reduction in usage. The new limits banned irrigation using hosepipes or sprinklers, and allowed people to wash their cars only by using buckets, not hoses. When dam levels continued to fall, reaching 25.3% at the start of July 2017,17 restrictions rose to level 4B, which limited each resident to 87 liters per day and aimed at citywide daily consumption of 500 million liters. (A few more months of spotty winter rain would take dam levels to 38% by October 2017.)
    After the 2017 winter produced the lowest seasonal rainfall ever recorded, city leaders realized that Cape Town's conventional drought response playbook was no longer up to the task. The city faced a choice of priorities: whether to focus its efforts on sharply augmenting supply or to concentrate on severely curtailing demand beyond anything ever seen before in Cape Town. 
    Augmentation was more intuitively attractive. Drilling new wells and/or building seawater desalination plants would help preserve the city's well-established record of service delivery and avoid the anger that might result from compelling residents to slash their usage. Strong citizen opposition could harm the city's reputation for good governance, reduce income from international tourism (which accounted for 7.5% of the city's total GDP in 2016),18 and hurt the DA's image in the eyes of voters, who had given the party a 65% majority during the 2016 municipal elections.
    In mid-2017, Patricia de Lille, who had been mayor since 2011 and was responsible for managing the water crisis, chose augmentation as the main thrust of her strategy to deal with the drought. Between June and December, de Lille pushed a strategy to accelerate the long-term augmentation plans outlined in the 2007 water plan, which included building desalination plants and developing groundwater supplies. Although she maintained traditional efforts to reduce demand, she proposed no drastic new measures to severely curtail usage.
    Instead, de Lille repeatedly assured residents, "We will not allow a well-run city to run out of water," promising that augmentation would arrive in time to avert the taps running dry.19
    On June 18, 2017, the mayor appointed what she called a "resilience task team" to ensure that "acute water shortages are avoided" by adding 100 million to 500 million liters of potable water to the city's daily supply by July 2018.20 Besides herself, the team included the city manager and other senior officials. Two months later, on August 21, the City Council also created a water resilience advisory committee, comprising hydrologists and other external experts, to advise the resilience task team. De Lille appointed Limberg as chair of the advisory committee.
    But by the end of 2017, the augmentation effort flagged amid concerns about the impact of groundwater extraction on the region's ecology, tight timelines, and severe cost implications. As the response stalled and the crisis dragged into the new year, De Lille faced a political backlash. Driven partly by concerns about her management of the water crisis-but also by unrelated allegations of malfeasance and factional tensions within the DA-the City Council on January 16, 2018, voted to strip her of authority over the water crisis.21 
    The council created a water crisis management committee led by de Lille's deputy, Neilson, and Limberg, the mayoral committee member for water and sanitation. At the same time, the council transferred operational responsibility for the drought response to the water and sanitation department, led by Kaiser, a civil engineer with a PhD in construction management who had been Cape Town's executive director for water and utility services since 2012, and Flower, her longtime director for water and sanitation.
    While massive augmentation proved impractical, de Lille had been correct that in the midst of an unprecedented drought, conventional demand reduction measures wouldn't be enough to prevent Cape Town from running out of sufficient water. With both the city's conventional water restriction measures and large-scale augmentation not up to the task, the only realistic option left to the newly appointed water crisis committee was to radically reduce demand-beyond anything the city had ever experienced. "We now had to ensure that we moved forward with the appropriate strategy, and aggressive demand reduction was the only viable strategy," Neilson said.
    
GETTING DOWN TO WORK
    Guided by its strategic goal to drastically reduce demand, the crisis committee worked to implement a multi-pronged response, acting in concert with the city's water and sanitation department, the communications department, and local and provincial government agencies involved with public works and disaster management. 
    The committee approved a new messaging strategy that put aside concerns about the city's reputation and emphasized to residents the dire potential consequences of Day Zero; supported the public rollout of a controversial online map showing water use by individual households; empowered the water department to throttle pressure and clamp down on water wasters; launched small-scale but affordable augmentation projects; and approved plans to preserve critical infrastructure and distribute water if aggressive demand reduction failed.
    
Communicating to avoid disaster
    Public communications formed the backbone of the city's renewed quest to incentivize residents to cut consumption. From a relatively modest beginning, the messaging program evolved with the worsening drought, becoming more insistent and more sharply focused, and eventually addressing nearly every aspect of life in the city. 
    In formulating its communications, the city was able to draw on an existing contract it had with local marketing and advertising agency Hero Communications, which had handled most of Cape Town's general external communications since August 2016.22 As the water crisis intensified during late 2017, the city's senior media liaison, Jean-Marie de Waal, as well as the water and sanitation department's Sarah Rushmere, worked closely with Hero to formulate messaging campaigns that would drive behavioral change among water users. 
    From the start, Cape Town's messaging took aim at households in formal neighborhoods, which used nearly two-thirds of the city's water. The rate at which the situation worsened meant that the team had little time to conduct focus groups and other research to test the effectiveness of their messages. Instead, they relied on daily social media sentiment analyses conducted by BrandsEye, a local company that had correctly predicted the outcomes of Britain's 2016 vote to leave the European Union and the US presidential election the same year.23 Whenever the city designed a new campaign, it used all available media channels-including its municipal website and social media accounts, as well as local newspaper and radio spots. 
    Early in the drought, Cape Town's messaging had centered on a relatively innocuous tagline: "#ThinkWater-care a little, save a lot." And even as the drought worsened in 2017, the city's messaging had been "a lot of social, fun and engaging stuff," according to Hero's Lockhart. "No red lights flashing to save water, but building awareness that we're entering a potentially tricky situation." The campaign featured upbeat, noncontroversial slogans like "Brown Is the New Green" next to a picture of a browning lawn. (See figure 2). 
    By late 2017, however, the focus of the messaging had shifted to helping the city reach specific water-saving targets that progressively tightened to 450 million liters per day. But while the citywide targets were ambitious, the communication lacked personal impact. To underscore the severity of the situation, messages shifted to focus on the role of individual citizens. 
    "We had to quantify water to people," Lockhart stressed. Working with IT specialists, the messaging team built a daily water-use calculator that residents could access on the city's website on download as a mobile application. Users could enter how long they showered, how often they flushed the toilet, washed their hands, did their laundry, cooked, or drank coffee or tea. The calculator then added together the amount of water each activity consumed, and showed whether the user was within, or had exceeded, his or her daily target. (See figure 3).
    The communications team enlisted companies in the campaign by helping them market water-saving products. The city arranged a series of "water wise expos," setting up stalls in shopping malls where companies could showcase their products and innovations. The city's support served as a powerful incentive for buyers, and the private use of water-saving devices ballooned. Companies and local universities developed products ranging from containers designed to collect water from shower floors, spray nozzles that turned a stream of water into a fine mist, tanks that easily collected and stored "greywater" from showers and washing machines, and even a foam spray that masked the appearance and smell of urine, reducing the need to flush toilets after every use. 
    The communications campaign also targeted visitors to the city. As the tourist season kicked off in late 2017, the communications team launched a "Save Like a Local" campaign on billboards at the airport and distributed posters and information materials to hotels and popular tourist attractions. The "Save Like a Local" messages used bright colors and combined images of some of the city's most famous landmarks with those of closed taps and empty buckets. (See figure 4).
    However, by the end of 2017, it was clear that Cape Town was still not doing enough to reduce consumption. Hero decided to bring on board as a subcontractor another company, Resolve Communications, which specialized in strategic messaging. Nick Clelland, a former DA politician and Resolve's chief executive officer, recognized the need for a unified theme that would cut across all messaging, strengthen impact, and have staying power. (Resolve's links to the DA led to some concerns about a potential conflict of interest).24 Clelland said that "when we arrived, the messaging was a bit all over the place"-a consequence of how much the situation had changed during the preceding months. "We needed to focus the communications around a central message," Clelland said.  
    By that time, city engineers and the disaster management department were already using "Day Zero" to describe the point at which the city's reservoirs would be dry. In their search for a new focus that would communicate the severity of the crisis, the communications team decided to adopt the ominous, two-word term. However, Clelland modified its meaning to indicate the day when water levels would reach 13.5%, forcing the shutdown of most taps throughout the city.
    "For me, the notion of a city like Cape Town having people standing in queues to collect water was already terrifying enough," Clelland said. "We didn't have to wait until dams were at 0% to talk about Day Zero, so Day Zero became the day on which people would no longer have drinking water at home." 
    Lockhart added that by the end of 2017, "we realized that we could no longer manage both reputation and water demand. The situation had become extremely serious, and we faced the very real risk of becoming the first big city to run out of water. We made a conscious decision to use fear as a nudge for behavior change even if this was potentially a reputational risk."
    The decision to play up the disastrous consequences that Day Zero would have was a radical move because it broke one of the golden rules of public relations-to always communicate a positive message. But facing the very real possibility that Cape Town would run out of water, the city's communicators opted for the negative campaign.
    Under severe time pressure, Clelland and the communications team quickly assembled focus groups to test the concept. They found that that the notion of "Defeating Day Zero" had a far greater impact than less-gloomy messages and was more likely to engender the kind of personal and community response that the crisis demanded. While the team designed materials that would communicate the new, more powerful message, the city set up a mock exercise designed to show how it would distribute water after it switched off the taps. Clelland said officials "were initially scared to show the world how people would have to stand in line to collect water after Day Zero. But we convinced them that we had to do the opposite-we had to showcase it." The communications team invited the media to the dry-run exercise, and the resulting images of people standing in queues and filling up water bottles while guarded by police sent shockwaves across the city. (See figure 5).
    To reinforce the message, De Lille announced on January 18, 2018, that Cape Town had "reached a point of no return" and that Day Zero was "likely" to happen on April 21.25 From that point onward, "avoiding or defeating Day Zero" became the central plank in the city's messaging campaign. 
    The new campaign-with examples such as "50 liters per day keeps Day Zero away"-gave people "a stark choice: Either you get 50 liters per day through your taps at home, or you get only half of that through standing in a queue every day. Which one would you prefer?" said Helen Zille, who became premier of the Western Cape in 2009 after serving as Cape Town's mayor since 2006. Although it was "a difficult choice [to use fearful messages] because you knew it's going to damage investment and the tourism industry, we also knew that the damage would be much greater if Cape Town actually ran out of water." 
    Day Zero messages became part of all of the city's official communications, and citizens encountered them everywhere they turned-even next to the city's highways, where digital billboards displayed the countdown to Day Zero and instructed residents to "reduce your consumption immediately!" (See figure 6).

Managing and publicizing data
    Improving the city's ability to collect and analyze data, as well as to publicly share it, was a key tool not only for tracking the crisis but for getting citizens to change their thinking and behavior in relation to water. Kevin Winter, an environmental scientist from the University of Cape Town and a member of the advisory committee chaired by Limberg, said previous demand management had been "quite top-down, all about restrictions and tariffs. It was less about information delivery and more about getting the users to just pay and comply. Now, it needed to be less of a technical approach and more about behavior change and public information." 
    The city had to share what it knew with Capetonians. Winter said that the advisory committee emphasized the need to "display the data and build trust in how you communicate the data. The city has an intelligent population, so take us into your confidence."
    Working with the Hero consultants, the city's communications department upgraded its public water dashboard-a webpage that showed rainfall levels, water quality, dam levels, consumption levels-to include the city's progress on augmentation projects and whether consumption and rainfall trends were on track to avoid Day Zero. The city had created the dashboard in May 2017, but the initial version did not include information on whether Cape Town was on track to avoid Day Zero. Once officials decided to share the data and estimates with the public, it began publishing a more comprehensive dashboard on November 16, 2017. (See figure 7).
    The water department decided to go a step further in its use of data by building a tool that enabled residents to monitor water use at the household level. After exploring various options, the department decided on setting up an online "water map" that would show the consumption level of every individual property in Cape Town. The map would make water saving personal. 
    The initial proposal was for the map to place a dark green dot on every household that used less than the allotted 6,000 liters per month (equal to 50 liters per person per day for a four-person household), a light green dot on every property that used between 6,000 and 10,500 liters per 
month, and a red dot on households that used more than 10,500 liters. It was a controversial idea that, the water department claimed, had never been tried by any government elsewhere in the world.26
    The map would serve multiple purposes. In a journal article published in September 2018, Kaiser and her colleagues explained that "the main goal of the water map was to publicly acknowledge households that saved water, thereby normalizing water conservation. A further aim was to demonstrate to skeptical citizens that compliance with the severe water restrictions imposed by the city was not only feasible but had already been achieved by at least some of their friends and neighbors."27
    But the proposed water map also raised serious concerns. One was that publicizing water usage levels from each household in the city would infringe on individuals' right to privacy. Another issue was that, although the department's stated aim was to use the map to acknowledge compliance, it could also lead to the stigmatization of households or certain neighborhoods, thereby "sowing disunity and tensions in a socioeconomically disparate city," Kaiser and her co-authors wrote.28 
    Seeking to avoid any public backlash, the department decided to eliminate the use of red dots for heavy water users. The dark and light green dots would remain for users of up to 10,500 liters a month, and grey dots would signify properties that used more than 10,500 liters and properties where usage information was unavailable. By combining the two categories, the map gave water guzzlers some plausible deniability to protect them from stigmatization. The team also created a hotline that allowed residents to report and correct any errors in the water map. 
    In January 2018, the department publicly rolled out the water map. It used municipal water billing information to determine whether a given household got a dark green, light green, or grey dot, and then overlaid the symbols onto a Google Maps spatial viewer. By using data from the city's geographic information system, the map also indicated the boundaries of individual properties, enabling citizens to see whether their household qualified for the dark-green dot that signified compliance with the 6,000-liter allotment.
    

Managing water pressure and curbing waste
    While messaging campaigns and the publication of detailed data served as incentives for residents to reduce their water usage, the water and sanitation department also turned to more direct methods to drive down demand. 
    The department's most potent tool for managing usage was its ability to adjust pressure in the city's system of pipes. Reducing the rate of flow lessened the volume of water that residents could access quickly and also minimized the amount lost to leaks. During the preceding decade, the department had installed dozens of digital pressure-management devices that gave it the ability to precisely control the pressure in different neighborhoods.
    However, Cape Town had not made optimal use of its pressure reduction tools, partly to avoid inconveniencing users and partly because the demand-management and reticulation units within the water department did not coordinate effectively. With water usage still well above the city's targets in late 2017, Cape Town could no longer afford the luxury of high water pressure. 
    To ensure better coordination, Flower assembled a team of engineers headed by representatives from the reticulation side and the demand-management directorate. Their first task was to speed up the existing project to expand the areas in which the department could control water pressure by installing more valves and digital pressure-management devices. During late 2017 and early 2018, the department worked closely with the two contractors installing the devices. Siyengo, the engineer in the demand-management directorate, said that by the end of January 2018, more than half (55%) of the city's 11,000 kilometers of pipelines were part of pressure-management zones. By measuring both pressure and flow rate, the devices allowed city officials to "know exactly how much water is flowing through those pipes," he explained.
    The devices also enhanced the department's ability to detect leaks. The team closely monitored the data to spot areas where the flow of water at night, when most people were asleep, was above average, indicating a potential leak. "The next day, we would go to that zone and go street-by-street using noise detection equipment to find and repair the leak," Siyengo said.
    In addition, because the digital devices monitored flow rates, they could respond to the needs of residents. For instance, pressure increased in response to people taking morning showers between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m. After 10 a.m., when usage declined, the devices could cut flow to make up for the water lost during the period of higher pressure.
    "People don't mind waiting 30 seconds longer to fill a glass of water in the afternoon, but they do mind if the water pressure is very low when they have to shower early in the morning," Siyengo explained.  
    Clamping down on water waste was a more delicate task. Under the level 6B restrictions and tariffs implemented in February 2018, the City Council increased the cost of water tenfold for households that were heavy users, using tens of thousands of liters per month.
    For water wasters who still failed to cut their use despite the higher prices, the City Council amended the municipal water bylaw to enable the installation of water management devices at such properties, regardless of whether the property owners approved. The bylaw also gave the city the authority to recoup the cost of the devices and installation by charging the heavy water users on their next municipal bill. 
    Once installed, the device automatically cut off supply when a property exceeded 350 liters per day and would not reopen until the following morning. The water management devices, or WMDs, soon got the nickname "weapons of mass destruction."
    
Augmenting supply
    By early 2018, although de Lille's earlier plans for large-scale augmentation had proved unworkable, the city moved ahead with efforts to increase supply from alternative sources, although at a far-smaller scale than the mayor had originally envisioned. Of the dozens of augmentation projects initially considered, by 2018 the city decided to undertake just seven that it deemed the most viable and cost-effective. 
    On the city's western coast, the water and sanitation department added 12 million liters to the city's supply per day by accelerating an existing project to use treated wastewater to recharge the Atlantis aquifer.29 The department also contracted with private companies to build three temporary desalination plants that yielded an additional 16 million liters a day by mid-2018.30 It further built a temporary reuse plant that began providing 10 million liters a day in late 2018, and drilled boreholes into the Cape Flats and Table Mountain Group aquifers to extract an additional 12 million liters daily.31 By July 2018, new sources provided an additional 40 million liters per day, and the total rose to 80 million liters by December.32 
    In early February 2018, the city received a one-time injection of water from outside the surface supply system, when the Groenland Water Users Association-an organization of fruit farmers from a region neighboring Cape Town-voluntarily donated 10 billion liters held in reservoirs on private farmland. Johan Groenewald, head of the association, said that the Groenland region had received more rain that Cape Town's catchment areas, "so we sat down and we realized that we have a surplus of water and we made a calculation" of how much the organization could donate.33 The association used an existing network of canals to transfer the water to the city's Steenbras dam. It amounted to an additional 20 days' supply for Cape Town.34 
    
Ensuring water for critical services
    City officials also had to ensure that sites that housed critical services-including schools, hospitals and other government buildings-had access to alternative supply sources, if at all possible. Because schools and hospitals were managed by the provincial government, the task primarily fell to a team led by Gavin Kode, the head of public works for the Western Cape. 
    Kode stressed the need to be realistic in the face of severe time constraints. "We had to implement while we planned. And right from the beginning, we emphasized that our work was not to ensure 'business as usual,'" he said. "This was an approaching disaster, so it was not comparable to normal circumstances. ... It was all zero-based planning as it had never been done before, and as Lewis Carroll said: 'If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.'" 
    As a first step, the public works team required city departments to add a water disaster management plan to their existing disaster plans. The plans had to identify critical staff members who would continue working after Day Zero, even if at reduced hours. 
    The team's next challenge was to decide which components of the Western Cape government absolutely had to continue to function if Day Zero arrived in Cape Town. "We identified approximately 90 facilities, including certain office buildings for ongoing command-and-control of the administration, provincial hospitals and significant primary healthcare facilities, and all of the social development residential child and youth care centers, that we had to secure by providing alternative supply sources," Kode said.
    The plan also identified 812 schools that had to remain open. The team developed a spreadsheet tracking tool to closely monitor augmentation projects at the schools and other key facilities. The Western Cape's public works department did not have enough time or money to sink boreholes at all 812 sites. Fortunately, however, about 10% of the schools already had them, even if they weren't in use. "Usually it was an electrical supply issue or a broken pump, so we very quickly got those functional again," Kode said. The provincial public works team worked closely with the education department to ensure that all of the schools had at least a water storage tank and a pressure pump. The tanks collected water from rainfall and the school's borehole, if there was one, as well as tanker trucks, could provide additional supply.
    The department further partnered with media outlets, private companies and Stellenbosch University to find corporate donors to sponsor the installation of smart meters at different schools. Each meter cost 30,000 rand (US$2,100). The meters automatically shut down the supply if they detected leaks during weekends or at night, and school principals could monitor usage on an app. Using pledges from 93 companies, the #SmartWaterMeterChallenge had funded the installation of meters at 342 schools by November 2018.
    Finally, the department used emergency procurement provisions to develop a framework for hiring contractors to sink boreholes at the other 90 facilities. By November 2018, Kode's team had sunk 165 new boreholes to ensure that the region's most important hospitals and other vital infrastructure had access to useable water if Day Zero arrived. As the team worked to access new water supplies, they had to be mindful of environmental impact. "By law, each borehole is required to have a logger that measures the water level and recharge rate of the borehole from the underlying aquifer. We have to monitor that and make sure we run our groundwater system strictly according to sustainable parameters," Kode said.
    
Preparing for the worst
	In early 2018, the arrival of Day Zero was a realistic possibility and a prominent concern. In spite of Cape Town's best efforts to avoid the reservoirs reaching 13.5%, the municipal government had to plan for the worst. The task principally fell to Richard Bosman, the city's executive director for safety and security, and to Colin Deiner, the head of the Western Cape's provincial disaster management and fire rescue services.
    In order to enable emergency procurement and channel more resources to disaster planning, the Western Cape government had declared the drought a provincial disaster in May 2017. (It took the national government until February 2018 to declare it a national disaster). Several months later, in October, Bosman launched a critical water shortage disaster plan that outlined three response phases. All of the measures designed to avoid Day Zero fell under phase 1; phase 2 outlined what would happen during Day Zero; and phase 3 introduced options if the reservoirs dried up completely. (See text box 3).

Box 3. The critical water shortages disaster plan

If dam levels hit 13.5%, triggering Day Zero and phase 2, the plan stipulated that “the City will more actively assume control over the daily water supply available to households and businesses.”  Under phase 2, only “strategic commercial areas, high-density areas with significant risk of increased burden of disease, such as informal settlements, and critical services, such as hospitals…will continue to receive drinking water through normal channels,”2 the plan said. Everywhere else, the government would shut off the taps. Residents living in neighborhoods without water service would have to collect a daily ration of 25 liters from designated public sites. 
The plan did not go into significant detail regarding phase 3, except to note that it would be activated once the supply system “no longer has surface water which the city can access.”3 Prior to the drought, most experts estimated that the city would no longer be able to access water from the reservoirs once levels dropped below 10%. However, Bosman noted that “we challenged the engineers to come up with plans to dig channels and cofferdams to make the water go further. The 10% figure had always been theoretical, but if pushed, the engineers said we could go as low as 5%” before extraction became impossible. Bosman added: “That later became a real ace in the pocket for the city, because that extra 5% would have given us three more months under phase 2.”
Nonetheless, if dam levels dropped so low that it was no longer possible to extract clean water, the city would “significantly reduce” even the provision of critical services, and planned to manually distribute whatever water it could extract from aquifers and springs, supplementing it with bottled water.4  

  Critical Water Shortage Disaster Plan, City of Cape Town, October 2017, accessed December 19, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20strategies%2C%20plans%20and%20frameworks/Critical%20Water%20Shortages%20Disaster%20Plan%20Summary.pdf. 
2 Ibid.  
3 Ibid.  
4 Ibid. 


    As the water and sanitation department, together with Neilson and Limberg, focused on phase 1 measures to avoid Day Zero, Bosman and Deiner turned their attention to designing phase 2 measures to manage Day Zero, when the supply to most buildings would be shut off and each resident would be allowed only 25 liters a day, collected from designated sites.
    The city set up an Incident Command System (ICS), a standardized organizational structure for coordinating emergency responses, and appointed Bosman as the Day Zero incident commander. The ICS brought together senior officials from different departments and assigned them to 11 teams that created plans for maintaining critical infrastructure to manage logistics and handle disease outbreaks after Day Zero. The ICS met on a weekly basis, and Bosman's staff also attended daily meetings held by Deiner's provincewide team.
    In late 2017, Bosman's team worked to identify 200 priority distribution sites around the city and draw up plans to provide water at each of them. His team selected the locations based on whether they were connected to the core reticulation system (so that they could remain "on" even when the surrounding neighborhood was shut off); were large enough to accommodate pedestrians and vehicles; had safe access and egress routes for parking and pedestrians; and whether the city would be able to make them secure.35 
    Each site was designed to provide 25 liters of water apiece to between 10,000 and 15,000 people per day, with between 100 and 500 water outlets per site.36 Some would offer drive-through convenience for residents arriving in vehicles. Plans also called for each site to have an operations center with first aid staff and manned by volunteers-many of whom had already signed up from civic organizations like neighborhood watches. Municipal safety and security staff would be at each site, along with police and the army. (See figure 8).
    Bosman said that, after drafting plans for the sites, "we had two dry runs: one with cars, and one for pedestrians. We went into detail, even calculating how long it takes to fill a 25-liter can." He added that the team grappled with the question of identification. "Some people suggested that we use national IDs or municipal rates accounts to check that people don't cheat; others proposed an app to verify your right to collect water. But water is a human right" in South Africa, Bosman said. Instead, the city decided on "light-touch regulation, where our officials would only look for visible abuse," he said. 
    To test the feasibility of a policy that required no identification or overt attempt to control people who might collect multiple water allocations on the same day, the disaster team ran an experiment at the Newlands Spring. "We sent staff to Newlands to queue for the whole day. They spent an average of 1.5 hours in line, so we understood that theoretically one person could make multiple trips to collect over 100 liters," Bosman said. "But that would take up his entire day, leaving no time for anything else, and cost more money in fuel than it was worth. At Newlands we saw that the overwhelming majority of people are responsible-no one is going to queue all day." 
    Although distribution sites received the most public attention-extensive media coverage of the two dry runs, conducted in sweltering summer heat, served as a deterrent against wasting water-they were not the only option available for making water available to people. Deiner said that, outside of the media spotlight, the province had also developed a broader program that would complement the city's distribution sites. Under the so-called all resources network plan, the provincial government would partner with private firms including South African Breweries, supermarket chains, logistics companies and private security companies, to help distribute bottled water. Deiner explained that planners ruled out the use of tanker trucks because of fears of contamination and the amount of time it would take to fill and empty them.
    Deiner pointed to the key role Western Cape's premier, Zille, played in facilitating the public-private partnership. The declaration of a provincial disaster "vested authority in the premier, and she played a very proactive role. She opened doors and facilitated meetings with everyone from university deans to big businesspeople very rapidly," Deiner said. 
    By February 2018, the international logistics company DHL, as well as Gift of the Givers, the largest Africa-based disaster relief organization, had signed up to help manage and store the millions of liters of bottled water donations that were flooding into the city from other parts of South Africa and the world. 
    Additionally, South African Breweries' plant in Cape Town was on standby to dedicate one of its production lines to bottling water instead of beer, and to distribute the water using its established network. Big supermarket chains like Pick n Pay, Woolworths, and Spar also agreed to distribute water from the DHL and city depots, while private security companies-an industry in South Africa that employed three times as many security officers as the national police service37-agreed to use their patrol cars to deliver bottled water to individual residences. By March 2018, "we had built a massive distribution system, and everybody bought in," Deiner said. 
    
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
    As Cape Town's efforts to drive down demand yielded results, the city soon faced two paradoxical new problems that had the potential to debilitate its finances. First, it lacked the power to significantly increase water tariffs as a way to enforce compliance with restrictions. Second, the radical decline in water usage also meant a radical decline in income from water tariffs.
    Under South Africa's governmental funding system, municipalities generally could not levy taxes, and instead relied on transfers from the national government to fund most of their services. However, electricity and water-use tariffs were major exceptions. In its 2017-18 budget, which became effective on July 1, 2017, Cape Town expected that the revenues it raised from water tariffs would account for 10.3% (3.9 billion rand, or US$270 million) of its total budget of 38.2 billion rand.38 
    In calculating its expected income for 2017-18 from water sold to non-indigent consumers, 
    Cape Town had used tariff rates linked to the level 4 water restrictions that had prevailed in early 2017, which allowed residents 100 liters per day. When mid-to-late 2017 brought the lowest annual rainfall in recorded history, however, it quickly became clear that the level 4 water tariffs adopted in the budget would not be aggressive enough to drive usage down to the point of avoiding Day Zero. The City Council urgently needed to adopt restrictions linked to tariff rates that were high enough to incentivize consumers to reduce usage to a trickle. 
    The council faced a roadblock, however. In an effort to create certainty and reduce the scope of interference in municipal finances, South Africa's Municipal Finance Management Act stipulated that a municipality could adopt water tariffs only once a year, during the budget drafting process. After the budget became effective in July, tariffs were locked at that level for the next 12 months. The result was that after mid-2017, there was no possibility of using higher tariffs as a policy tool to reduce consumption. 
    In response, the council appealed to the national finance minister for an exemption to adjust water tariffs midyear. The minister approved the request at the end of October 2017, enabling the city to create four new levels of restrictions (levels 5, 6, 6B, and 7) linked to very high tariffs. (Level 7 tariffs would fund the Day Zero disaster plan, when residents would be billed for the water they collected at the distribution points.) 
    On February 1, 2018, Cape Town began implementing level 6B restrictions and tariffs. (See figure 9). Level 6B was the toughest water restriction ever implemented in the city-setting a daily usage target of 50 liters per person-and came with punitive new tariffs. Unlike in the past, when tariff increases mostly targeted households that consumed the most water (wealthier households tended to use more than 10,500 liters per month), level 6B also made water much more expensive for non-indigent households that consumed relatively little water (poorer households often used less than 10,500 liters per month). 
    The city's success had made these changes essential. By February 2018, ever-tightening restrictions had forced the vast majority of households to cut their usage to less than 10,500 liters per month. The city thus had to ensure that higher tariffs also incentivized further savings by households that already used relatively little water. Additionally-and perversely-as fewer households used excessive amounts of water, Cape Town could no longer afford to use that income to provide free and subsidized water to non-indigent households that had reduced consumption to very low levels. (However, despite the declining revenues, the city would continue to meet its constitutional obligations by providing free water to the 268,000 indigent households in Cape Town).
    Consequently, under level 6B, a non-indigent household that used 6,000 per month paid R179.58 (US$14)39-an increase of 84% compared to the level 4 tariffs that previously applied.40 And once a household exceeded the 6,000-liter restriction, the costs increased exponentially. A household using 10,500 liters per month would pay R415.56 (US$34); 20,000 liters would cost R1,555.56 (US$128); 35,000 liters would cost R6,685.56 (US$552) per month, and consumers that used 50,000 liters in a month would be hit with a bill of R20,365.56 (US$1,681.71).41 (If consumers failed to pay their bills, the city would install a water management device at their property that limited them to 6,000 liters per month.)
    A follow-on challenge remained, however. While the high level 6B tariffs addressed the problem of incentivizing all households to save even more water, they still did not generate enough revenue to solve the city's fiscal problem. "We realized that running out of water wasn't the only risk. The other risk was that we would run out of money, and these two things were interrelated," Neilson said. "We have 11,000 kilometers of pipelines to maintain, and 80% of our [water maintenance] expenses were fixed regardless of how much water people used." 
    On top of the earlier savings, between February 2017 and February 2018 alone, Capetonians had cut their water usage to 500 million liters per day from 900 million liters-a reduction of 45% in just one year.42 Neilson said that as a result of the radical decline in water usage, the municipality had collected 700 million rand (US$50 million), or 36% less revenue from water sales, than the 2017-18 budget had estimated for the second half of 2017. By the end of the 2017-18 financial year, the city was on track to collect only 2.5 billion of the 3.9 billion rand it had expected to receive from water tariffs.43 In total, diminished revenue from falling water sales could cost Cape Town 3.7% of its total annual budget.44 
    After Neilson and Limberg's crisis committee assumed control of the response, it introduced a proposal to generate revenue through an additional fixed water surcharge. The surcharge would be based on the size of each property's water connection. Although the surcharge plan was "obviously unpopular, it was one of those things that we just had to do," Neilson said. The City Council approved it, and the surcharge became effective on July 1, 2018. 
    In a video post directed at consumers, Kaiser explained, "We're selling less than half the water we were, while having to provide the same delivery service. The cost of running the water and sanitation network has not changed in direct proportion to the amount of water used or sold. The same repairs and maintenance are necessary to keep water and sewerage flowing reliably. The same number of meters need to be read and the same number of invoices need to be generated. In order to keep water flowing to your taps, we have introduced a water delivery charge system."45
    Between February and June 2018, the level 6B tariffs helped to limit the amount of lost revenues, but the city still collected only 3.6 billion rand (US$258 million) of the 3.9 billion rand (US$270 million) it had budgeted for the 2017/2018 financial year. Following the implementation of the surcharge, however, Cape Town managed to fully plug the deficit. In fact, Neilson said that under the combined impact of punishing tariffs and the water surcharge, "we actually over-recovered by about 400 million rand (US$28 million) in cash between July and December 2018 due to the fact that we sold more water than we had estimated." 
    
ASSESSING RESULTS 
    On June 28, 2018, Neilson announced that Cape Town had officially avoided Day Zero, and that if "adequate water restrictions are maintained, the City is confident that there will be no prospect of reaching Day Zero in 2019."46 (See figure 10). With each resident using little more than 50 liters per day, Cape Town had achieved the lowest per capita water consumption of any major city in the world without resorting to intermittent supply.
    Avoiding Day Zero was an unprecedented feat, achieved on the back of profound behavioral change that saw millions of Capetonians redefine their relationship with water. Between February 2015 and July 2018, the city lowered its daily water consumption to 478 million liters47 from 1.2 billion liters-a decrease of nearly 60%. In a period of only one year between February 2017 and February 2018, consumption declined by 45%.48 In comparison, it took Melbourne 12 years to reduce consumption by 50% following that city's "Millennium Drought" during the 2000s, while California reduced usage by only 27% during a two-year drought that began in August 2013.49
    Statistical analyses conducted by the city's water and sanitation department showed that at the height of the crisis between January 18 and July 27, 2018-after usage had already declined from 1.2 billion liters in February 2015-average daily demand declined by a further average of 101 million liters per day, to 507 million liters. Out of the average decline of 101 million liters per day, the department attributed 66 million liters to its aggressive pressure management. The forced adoption of water management devices accounted for another 11 million liters saved per day, while "elective consumer change" saved over 24 million liters every day.50 Better pressure management and improved leak detection was thus a key intervention that came at precisely the moment that the city needed it most. 
    Kevin Winter, the environmental scientist from the University of Cape Town, praised the city's enthusiastic embrace of sharing information with the public. "Prior to this drought, I couldn't tell you what the dam levels were and how much water was being used during any given week. Now, the dam levels and usage levels are updated weekly. The models being used and the data being shared is amazing-it's what a modern city should be doing." 
    The publication of the water map took data sharing down to the personal level. According to a study published by Kaiser and other officials in the water department, only days after it went live, the website hosting the map "experienced some of the highest internet traffic ever by a City of Cape Town webpage."51 Despite early concerns that the map would lead to privacy lawsuits and "exacerbate tensions between different 
socioeconomic groups," those concerns "ultimately did not materialize, and it is thought that the map may even have helped reduce stigmatization and scapegoating by showing that every neighborhood, rich or poor, includes households that are saving water," Kaiser and her co-authors reported.52 As of September 2018, no lawsuits had been filed against the map.53
    International observers hailed Cape Town's achievement as a benchmark for other water-scarce cities. A March 2018 article by the Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York praised Cape Town's "water-conservation campaign-a dexterous combination of voluntary and forcible methods-[as] an extraordinary achievement by any measure...Even compared with other drought-stricken regions internationally, it is now believed to have the lowest consumption of water per capita of any developed city in the world."54 (See exhibit 1).
    Having successfully staved off both Day Zero and a looming financial crisis-and following better (but still below-average) rainfall during the winter of 2018-the City Council on September 10, 2018, delivered some welcome relief for consumers. With full coffers and dam levels approaching 70%, Neilson announced that effective October 1, the city would relax restrictions and tariffs from level 6B to level 5, allowing each Capetonian to use 70 liters (up from 50 liters) per day and reducing water tariffs by between 26.6% and 70% for residential users.55
    
REFLECTIONS 
    According to Cape Town's water outlook, a document that the water department started publishing during the drought to provide detailed information to the public, domestic users reduced their consumption by two-thirds between February 2016 and February 2018.56 The document noted that "most of this was achieved by households with a metered house connection" 57-indicative of the impact of messaging and other measures aimed at residents in formal households. Domestic users cut their consumption to less than 200 million liters per day in February 2018 from close to 500 million in February 2016. Conversely, the water outlook said "reduction in usage in commerce and industry has been more modest," having declined to about 80 million liters per day from just over 100 million between February 2016 and February 2018.58 
    While domestic users in formal households, who used the largest share of water, thus engineered the greatest part of the reduction, the city also succeeded in cutting water use across all income levels. (See figure 12). Although users in lower income brackets started from a much lower base, by early 2018, poor as well as rich households all used less water than they had used prior to the onset of the drought in 2015.
    But it was unclear what long-term price the city would pay for its aggressive, fear-based messaging around Day Zero. Extensive coverage of the crisis by the international media, including their broadcasting of visceral images showing near-empty reservoirs, potentially created the impression that Cape Town had already run out of water, jeopardizing tourism arrivals and investment. In December 2018, Cape Town partnered with Wesgro, a regional development authority, as well as the Cape Town and South African tourism councils to jointly fund a new marketing campaign valued at 12 million rand (US$860,000) that focused on luring back tourists from key markets like the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.59 In its report on the campaign, the city acknowledged that the tourism "industry is vulnerable to key shocks such as the water crisis and the accompanying negative imagery that was propagated by international media...[The imagery] definitely had an impact in making Cape Town a less desirable tourism destination." 
    Though the city had remarkable success in staving off Day Zero during 2018, that may not have been the end of the story. Rainfall in 2018 was higher than in the preceding three years, but the estimated runoff of 600 million cubic meters into the six large reservoirs supplying Cape Town was still below the long-term average of 711 million cubic meters. "The problem is that we don't know where we are in the drought cycle. The drought may not be over, and 2018 may only have been a relatively positive blip in a longer drought trend," said Michael Webster, who worked as a World Bank water and sanitation specialist for 18 years before succeeding Flower as Cape Town's director of water and sanitation in July 2018. 
    Piotr Wolski, a hydro-climatologist at the University of Cape Town, similarly warned that "over the last 84 years...[the] trend is towards lower rainfall and it has a relatively strong magnitude-[a decline of] 17 millimeters per ten years...The important thing is that this trend may be an expression of human-caused climate change."60 Elsewhere, Wolski wrote that the intensity of the drought "should make us think hard about anthropogenic climate change as a possible driver of the trend."61 Helen Zille, a former mayor of Cape Town who served as Western Cape premier since 2009, said one outcome of the drought was that "we could no longer entirely rely on the weather forecast, which we usually based our annual planning on. I knew that climate change would mess with the weather, but I didn't realize how much it would mess with the weather forecasts." 
    But the return of rains in 2018 at least gave the city an opportunity to reassess its long-term plans. Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson, a trained civil engineer who co-led the crisis response from January 2018, compared Cape Town's experience to those of two drought-stricken cities in Australia. Despite the early focus on augmentation, "we are grateful that we didn't follow the route of Melbourne, which installed a 'drought buster' desalination plant that they never used because the rain came." 
    The plant, known as the Victorian Desalination Plant, cost US$4 billion to install and incurred annual operating costs of $649 million.62 However, by the time that its construction was complete in December 2012, Melbourne's reservoir levels stood at over 80%, which meant that the plant immediately went into standby.63 Instead, Neilson said that Cape Town was rightly following the "'Perth model,' where they got into augmentation step-by-step. Perth slowly put desalination of 100 million liters per day into operation." 
    However, Neilson cautioned against taking comparisons too far. "A lot of people pointed to countries in the Middle East as examples of seawater desalination we should follow. But [since these countries were located in deserts], they had no alternative to desalination." Despite the changing climate patterns, Neilson said, "we still have alternatives like groundwater, reuse, and enhancing our surface supply. We need a smart mix of these things, and the question is how to work out the most appropriate next scheme."


Exhibit 1. Water savings cut across neighborhoods and socio-economic categories

Images are not available

Exhibit 1 shows how water usage declined across the city's different income quintiles. (The spikes indicate increased usage during summer). While most of the reduction came from wealthier, quintile 5 households, all income levels reduced their water use between August 2014 and December 2017. 
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180301050744/https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-03-01-op-ed-a-drought-stricken-cape-town-did-come-together-to-save-water/. 

The map in shows that water use declined in nearly all of Cape Town's different neighborhoods. 
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180301050744/https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-03-01-op-ed-a-drought-stricken-cape-town-did-come-together-to-save-water/. 



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27 Ken Sinclair-Smith, Susan Mosdell, Gisela Kaiser, Ziyaad Lalla, Leandre September, Collin Mubadiro, Sarah Rushmere, Katherine Roderick, Johanne Brühl, Megan McLaren and Martine Visser, "City of Cape Town's Water Map," Journal - American Water Works Association, 110 (9), p. 62-66, September 2018. 
28 Ken Sinclair-Smith, Susan Mosdell, Gisela Kaiser, Ziyaad Lalla, Leandre September, Collin Mubadiro, Sarah Rushmere, Katherine Roderick, Johanne Brühl, Megan McLaren and Martine Visser, "City of Cape Town's Water Map," Journal - American Water Works Association, 110 (9), p. 62-66, September 2018. 
29 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 5, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
30 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 5, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
31 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 5, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
32 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 5, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
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34 "Watch: Cape Town gets 10 billion liters of water," eNCA, February 6, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018; https://www.enca.com/south-africa/cape-town-gets-10bn-litres-of-water. 
35 Richard Bosman, Briefing on Water Disaster Plan (presentation), November 29, 2018.
36 Richard Bosman, Briefing on Water Disaster Plan (presentation), November 29, 2018.
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40 Author's calculations based on City of Cape Town, "New tariffs to encourage 50-litre usage, - Cape Town," Politicsweb, February 6, 2018, accessed February 11, 2019; http://politicsweb.co.za/politics/new-tariffs-to-encourage-50litre-usage--cape-town and City of Cape Town, Water Level 4 Reduction, accessed February 11, 2019; http://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/Financial%20documents/Budget%202018-2019%20Annexure%206%20Water%20and%20Sanitation%20-%20Water%20Level%204%20Reduction.pdf. 
41 City of Cape Town, "New tariffs to encourage 50-litre usage, - Cape Town," Politicsweb, February 6, 2018, accessed February 11, 2019; http://politicsweb.co.za/politics/new-tariffs-to-encourage-50litre-usage--cape-town. 
42 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 6, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
43 Author's calculations based on City of Cape Town, 2017/18-2019/20 Budget, p.106, May 2017, accessed December 18, 2018, http://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/Financial%20documents/AnnexureA_1718Budget_May2017.pdf.
44 Author's calculations based on City of Cape Town, 2017/18-2019/20 Budget, p.106, May 2017, accessed December 18, 2018, http://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/Financial%20documents/AnnexureA_1718Budget_May2017.pdf.
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46 Ian Neilson, "No Day Zero for 2019 if appropriate water restrictions are maintained," City of Cape Town, June 28, 2018, accessed December 18, 2018; https://www.capetown.gov.za/Media-and-news/No%20Day%20Zero%20for%202019%20if%20appropriate%20water%20restrictions%20are%20maintained. 
47 City of Cape Town, Water and Sanitation Department.
48 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 6, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
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50 "City of Cape Town Pressure Management (presentation)," Water Demand Management Directorate, p. 40.
51 Ken Sinclair-Smith, Susan Mosdell, Gisela Kaiser, Ziyaad Lalla, Leandre September, Collin Mubadiro, Sarah Rushmere, Katherine Roderick, Johanne Brühl, Megan McLaren and Martine Visser, "City of Cape Town's Water Map," Journal - American Water Works Association, 110 (9), p. 62-66, September 2018. 
52 Ken Sinclair-Smith, Susan Mosdell, Gisela Kaiser, Ziyaad Lalla, Leandre September, Collin Mubadiro, Sarah Rushmere, Katherine Roderick, Johanne Brühl, Megan McLaren and Martine Visser, "City of Cape Town's Water Map," Journal - American Water Works Association, 110 (9), p. 62-66, September 2018. 
53 Ken Sinclair-Smith, Susan Mosdell, Gisela Kaiser, Ziyaad Lalla, Leandre September, Collin Mubadiro, Sarah Rushmere, Katherine Roderick, Johanne Brühl, Megan McLaren and Martine Visser, "City of Cape Town's Water Map," Journal - American Water Works Association, 110 (9), p. 62-66, September 2018. 
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56 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 2, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
57 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 2, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
58 City of Cape Town, Water Outlook 2018 Report Revision 25, p. 2, May 20, 2018; https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20research%20reports%20and%20review/Water%20Outlook%202018%20-%20Summary.pdf. 
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60 Piotr Wolski, "How severe is the drought? An analysis of the latest data," GroundUp, January 22, 2018, accessed December 18, 2018; https://www.groundup.org.za/article/how-severe-drought-detailed-look-data/. 
61 Piotr Wolski, "How severe is the drought," Climate Change, Climate Services, Climate Research, Africa, August 31, 2017, accessed December 18, 2018; https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2017-08-31-how-severe-is-the-droughta.
62 Claudia Poposki, "Melbourne desalination plant costs tax-payers an eye-watering $649 million in annual operating charges," Daily Mail, May 20, 2018, accessed February 11, 2019; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5749621/Melbourne-desalination-plant-costs-tax-payers-eye-watering-649-million-year-operate.html. 
63 "Victorians pay dearly, but not a drop to drink," ABC, December 18, 2012, accessed February 11, 2019; http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3656791.htm. 

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