PROJECTS

Sustainable Water Augmentation Plan for the City of Cape Town, South Africa

Integrated Water Resilience Planning

The problem

In 2018 the City of Cape Town was running out of water. Day Zero was a real threat, the point at which the city’s water supply network would be turned off and residents rationed to 25 liters of water each, collected from distribution points. The immediate crisis was addressed by the restriction of water use and average rainfall in 2018. However, the City did not have a consistent, robust long-term strategy to ensure that there would never again be a water shortage.

How we helped

Castalia helped the City develop a long-term strategy by showing them how to do robust scenario planning. We recommended the City set the desired reliability of supply, develop an augmentation plan to meet the desired reliability, stress-test the base-case plan under other scenarios to develop a robust plan, and calculate the insurance premium implied by a higher reliability of supply, and reassess the plan if it is not cost-benefit justified.

Impact

With Castalia’s advice, the City was able to publish a draft strategy in February 2019, and has taken measures to ensure reliability of supply by assessing potential sites for a desalination plant.