After the early rains of 2020, it may seem like a time of plenty in the Olifants River Catchment, but don’t bank on it lasting, says Dr. Sharon Pollard, Director of the Association for Water and Rural Development. She warned of looming job losses and water shortages in Hoedspruit and Phalaborwa if unsustainable plans to transfer water out of the Olifants are implemented.
“If these plans are sanctioned, water security in 2020 and beyond is far from guaranteed,” she said, speaking after a meeting with stakeholders from the lower and middle Olifants that focused on proposed inter-basin transfers to Polokwane.
The contentious plans include increased volumes of water transfers from De Hoop Dam on the Steelpoort River (in the middle Olifants) to mining and domestic users, including to domestic users in Polokwane and Mokopane in the neighbouring Sand River catchment.
According to Pollard, this could have serious knock-on effects, putting 10,000 agricultural jobs in the Blyde irrigated area at risk and threatening Lepelle Northern Waters’ supply of drinking water to lower Olifants users, including Hoedspruit and Phalaborwa.
“The science is clear. Even under current circumstances, we run out of water annually. Increasing off-take from 30 to 150 megalitres would jeopardize an already stressed system, threatening South Africa’s second biggest irrigation scheme, Kruger’s wildlife and associated economy, and subsistence livelihoods in Mozambique.”
Increasing off-takes by 300% also has serious water quality implications. “The less the flows, the less the dilution capacity of the Olifants River, and the greater the water quality implications for downstream users,” says Pollard.
The potential impact on livelihoods beyond Massingir in Mozambique is also huge. “Without these freshwater releases from Massingir Dam, hundreds of hectares of arable land will salt up and be rendered unusable,” says Hugo Retief, who has been working with Dr Pollard along with Mozambiquan partners to build resilience within the Olifants catchment through the USAID Resilim O project.
“Given our country’s water challenges, it is easy to forget the fact that the Olifants River flows through Kruger and into Mozambique. Massingir Dam, which lies just across the border into Mozambique faces its own set problems, including algal blooms and reduced capacity to release water to prevent saltwater intrusion of the downstream floodplain,” he notes.
Part of AWARD’s work under USAID Resilim O has been to bring together water resource users and decision-makers from across the water sector to address these issues. They have held and participated in workshops with representatives from large-scale commercial farmers to smallholders, as well as from various water board, the national and regional Department of Water and Sanitation, and members of water forums in the upper, middle and lower Olifants. These include water user associations, representatives from the mining sector and from mining-affected communities, from Kruger and from Mozambique.
“Most of the stakeholders we have engaged with say that the plans to extract more water from the Olifants are not feasible,” said Pollard. This isn’t the only challenge the catchment faces, as river users also contend with unlawful water use and stalled bureaucratic processes which pose a further challenge to revitalising the sector’s plans.
“With this number of challenges, we need innovative and adaptive system-wide management of the Olifants River Catchment. But sadly, we are facing exactly the opposite situation,” says Pollard. Dr Jai Clifford-Holmes, who works with Dr Pollard, notes that key planning documents, such as the Olifants River Reconciliation Strategy (which seeks to reconcile growing demands with the forecasted water supply) are based on overly-optimistic assumptions and outdated information. Perhaps most seriously, the planning strategy estimates that there is double the quantity of available groundwater, ignoring much lower figures from recent groundwater assessments.
“These planning documents over-estimate our ability to constrain the growing water demand of urban, mining, and agricultural users, whilst simultaneously being over-confident about alternative forms of water supply,” says Clifford-Holmes.
Part of the problem, is that many of these planning documents are anywhere from 5 to 15 years old and contain hydrological estimates that desperately need revising. The most recent national hydrological study (WR2012), for example, shows that there is 30% less available water than 2005.
Add the effects of climate change to the mix, and things look even worse. Climate change assessments published in December 2018 by esteemed hydrologist Professor Roland Schultze predict an overall increase in temperature in the Olifants catchment.
Irrigators will be one of the users most at risk. Crop irrigation requirements in the Olifants catchment are forecasted to increase with climate change by 4 to 12%. This means that simply to harvest the same yield, using the same crop types, farmers will need to use between 4 and 12% more water than they are currently using.
Concerned stakeholders have requested a new reconciliation strategy that incorporates climate change and more recent data around ground water availability and user demand. “Our objective is to lobby government to reassess water availability and allocations in the Olifants, because if we don’t do that, there is a good chance it’s going to run out,” she says.
