Recurring droughts have destroyed most harvests in the Sahel. Credit:Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
JOHANNESBURG, Sep 21 2014 (IPS)

It is a critical time for international climate change negotiations. By December 2015, world leaders are due to decide on an international climate change agreement covering all countries that will take effect in 2020. 

Going into the upcoming United Nations negotiations — the December COP 20 talks in Lima, Peru, where the agreement will be drafted, and the pivotal COP 21 next year in Paris, France, where it is due to be signed — African climate change negotiators are driving for leaders to up their commitment to climate change adaptation.

“No matter what we do, we are at a stage where we need to adapt. Adaptation should be at the centre of the deal in Paris,” South Africa’s director of international climate change, Maesela Kekana, a negotiator with the African Group of Negotiators, told IPS. “If we do not get adaptation, then it means Africa would not have got anything since the beginning.”

The African Group has proposed that a global adaptation goal should be part of the 2015 agreement.

Africa is one of the continents most vulnerable to climate change. As the world continues to warm it is likely that land temperatures in Africa will rise quicker than the global average, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Climate change impacts would place added stress on already stretched water resources in parts of the continent and affect crop production. For instance, roughly 65 percent of maize-growing areas in Africa would experience yield losses for just one degree Celsius of warming, with impacts worsened by drought, according to a 2011 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

Coastal areas run the risk of damage from sea level rise. In Tanzania, for example, it is estimated that with sea-level rise by 2030 as much of 7,624 square kilometres of land could be lost, with up to 1.6 million people at risk of being flooded, according to researchers from the University of Southampton.

Adapting to climate change will be costly. Developed nations have pledged to mobilise 100 billion dollars a year for climate action in developing countries by 2020.

“We want to disaggregate [the 100 billion dollars] and have an adaptation target or goal for supporting adaptation,” Mali’s Seyni Nafo, a lead negotiator with the African Group of Negotiators, told IPS.

While the group hasn’t yet decided on the specific amount, it wants to ensure funds are set aside for adaptation and mainly channeled through the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations fund set up to channel climate aid to developing countries, he explained.

In the past the majority of global climate finance has gone to funding mitigation measures. Of the 30 billion dollars developed countries gave to developing countries between 2010 and 2012 for climate change action just 21 percent went into adaptation, according to a 2012 Oxfam report.

The Green Climate Fund aims to split its funding 50: 50 for mitigation and adaptation.

Germany recently pledged one billion dollars to the fund, but other developed nations are yet to make large pledges.

“As one of my African colleagues says, ‘it’s still an empty vault,’” Matthew Stilwell, an adviser on climate change negotiations and policy with the Institute of Governance and Sustainable Development, told IPS. “Developed countries’ tendency is to withhold some of the money and offer the money as part of the quid pro quo in Paris as part of the negotiations.”

Mithika Mwenda, secretary general of civil society coalition the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, welcomed the potential of the Green Climate Fund but remained sceptical.

“Based on the experience of the other existing funds, which are just shells, our fear is that we are going to have the Green Climate Fund going the way of the Adaptation Fund and the Least-Developed Countries Fund, and the others — we have celebrated them but eventually they end up a disappointment,” Mwenda told IPS.

As 2015 draws near, the urgency of dealing with human-induced climate change is becoming more apparent since the effects of climate change are already being seen.

“Higher seas, devastating heat waves, torrential rain and other climate extremes” are being felt around the world as a result of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions, says a leaked draft report from the U.N., The New York Times reported.

The report notes that continued emissions “will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

While there are hopes for an ambitious 2015 climate agreement some civil society actors, frustrated with continued political wrangling over climate change, are not holding their breath.

“There are a lot of unfulfilled promises from the first COP to now,” Rajen Awotar, executive chairman of the nonprofit Mauritius Council for Development, Environmental Studies and Conservation, told IPS.

“The 2015 agreement: I bet we’ll see a very weakened agreement,” he said. “There will be no winner; everybody will be a loser. The biggest loser will be the climate.”

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

Carbon Emissions Soon to Become Taxing for Big South African Polluters from IPS News on Vimeo.

The Umgeni River system supplies drinking water to about five million people in the city of Durban, South Africa. But demand for water has outstripped supply for the past seven years. Pictured here is Howick Falls, which lies on the Umgeni River. Credit: Brendon Bosworth/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Jun 3 2014 (IPS)

South Africa’s eThekwini municipality may have come under fire from residents from proposing to purify wastewater so it can be used for drinking, but this municipality’s pragmatic approach to water management has made it one of the most progressive in Africa. 

Neil Macleod, head of water and sanitation at eThekwini municipality, which encompasses the port city of Durban, has reason to be proud of his colleagues.

The eThekwini municipality, which was created through joining smaller municipalities within Durban, the province’s urban centre, has overcome huge challenges following its formation in 2000. “They actually translated the constitutional rights of South Africans to have access to water by definition into reality — that’s very important." -- Joppe Cramwinckel, director of water at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development

At that time, due to Apartheid planning, the city of Durban had first-world quality water services, serving about one million people, MacLeod told IPS. But there were another one million people living in the surrounding dormitory towns with neglected and degraded infrastructure. A further one million people living in the municipality’s rural areas had no access to proper water services, he explained.

South Africa’s 1996 constitution guarantees citizens the right to water, so over the years the municipality has rolled out water and sanitation services, often having to innovate in rural areas and informal settlements.

To provide sanitation services to citizens in informal settlements, the municipality has introduced modified shipping containers that house showers, wash troughs and toilets, Macleod explained.

Poor families also receive free water, an allocation of nine kilo-litres per month.

“We have about 300,000 families that receive free basic water and free basic sanitation — either a container toilet or a urine diverting toilet,” Macleod told IPS.

Last week, the municipality’s water and sanitation unit scooped the Stockholm Industry Water Award, which is given to utilities or companies that have achieved excellence in water management.

Jens Berggren, director of the Stockholm Water Prize and Stockholm Industry Water Award, tells IPS that the “[eThekwini municipality] has been addressing issues in a very pragmatic and understanding way.”

“Not from above, from a technical perspective, but based in reality — these are people’s lives that they have to live.”

Joppe Cramwinckel, director of water at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, one of the award’s partner organisations, told IPS “they’re operating under very difficult circumstances.”

“They have a large customer base to cover, and a variety of customers, and they have developed and experimented with some very novel approaches to deal with the big challenges they face.

“They actually translated the constitutional rights of South Africans to have access to water by definition into reality — that’s very important,” he said.

South Africa’s 232-kilometre Umgeni River is clean upstream but the closer it gets to the sea, the dirtier it becomes. Credit: Brendon Bosworth/IPS

Water shortages on horizon

But Macleod and the water and sanitation department can’t afford to rest on their laurels, however.

As IPS reported in 2013, the municipality faces the prospect of future water shortages, due in part to its reliance on the oversubscribed Umgeni river system.

The recently built Spring Grove dam is now about 80 percent full, said Macleod, and with good rains recently, he is confident there won’t be shortages for the next two years.

“Statistically, we’re still okay until the end of 2015. Thereafter, who knows? If a drought hits and demand continues to grow the way it is then we move back into deficit,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you have rationing immediately, or restrictions, but the chances of it go up and up.”

Various water augmentation options for the region are currently on the table. The municipality has proposed treating and purifying its wastewater so it can be used as drinking water. The purified water would be mixed with conventional drinking water at a ratio of 30 percent re-used water to 70 percent conventional.

There has been some resistance to the idea, including a petition by concerned residents.

Since treated wastewater is discharged into rivers and then winds up in the drinking water supply, people are already drinking recycled sewage, said Macleod. “We’ve been drinking sewage for 40 years, quite happily, as has a lot of this country — Johannesburg included.” 

To buffer the water supply in future, state-owned company Umgeni Water, the largest supplier of bulk potable water in KwaZulu-Natal province, has proposed building two seawater desalination plants.

One of the plants would be on the south coast, adjacent to the Lovu River, and one would be on the north coast near Tongaat.

Each plant would be capable of producing 150 megalitres of water a day, enough to fill 75 Olympic swimming pools.

The proposed desalination plants could offer an alternative to building a costly and large dam on the uMkhomazi river, which would likely be operational by 2030.

Water would be sucked into the plants from one kilometre offshore, in the case of the Lovu plant, and 650 metres offshore in the case of the Tongaat plant, according to information supplied by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which is doing the environmental assessment for Umgeni Water.

The saltwater would be converted to potable water at the plants by the process of reverse osmosis. This involves pumping saltwater at high-pressure through a semi-permeable membrane that retains the salt, and allows water to pass through.

“It’s feasible but it’s just very energy intensive and much more expensive than the other options,” said Macleod of the desalination plants. “The harsh reality is we don’t have the energy and we can’t afford the costs.”

While authorities are weighing up the pros and cons of the various water augmentation options — recycling sewage water, building desalination plants, or constructing a new dam — time is running short.

“Soon we have to make a decision,” said Macleod. “It has to be this year.”

South Africa, the world’s 12th highest emitter of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, is attempting to transition to a low-carbon economy. Credit: Brendon Bosworth/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
CAPE TOWN, May 28 2014 (IPS)

To curb greenhouse gas emissions, South Africa wants to put a tax on carbon emissions from big polluters.

The aim of making polluters pay for the carbon they pump into the atmosphere is to help South Africa, the world’s 12^th highest emitter of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, transition to a low-carbon economy.

“We have one of the most carbon intensive economies in the world,” Anton Cartwright, a researcher on the green economy at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities, told IPS.

Coal-burning power plants provide close to ninety percent of South Africa’s electricity, making the economy highly carbon intensive.

“We don’t get a great bang for buck on our coal,” said Cartwright. “We use a low-grade coal with a very high CO2 content.”

The tax was slated to take effect in 2015 but in February this year National Treasury announced it would be pushed back to January 2016, citing the need for “further consultation.”

Offsets to cushion blow to industry

Initially, the carbon tax would see big polluters, including companies in the mining, fossil fuel and steel sectors, paying 11.50 dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent on between 20 and 40 percent of their total carbon emissions.

To cushion the effect on industry, the National Treasury has proposed allowing polluters to lower their tax liability by investing in carbon offsets.

“The combination of a tax and offsets is very sensible,” said Cartwright. “You’re priming the market and then providing flexibility.”

A carbon offset is a measure that reduces, avoids or sequesters emissions. Polluters buy credits, each equivalent to one tonne of carbon, from verified projects — including, for example, reforestation programmes and initiatives that increase energy efficiency in the housing sector — at prices cheaper than the tax.

South Africa’s large-scale carbon offset market is currently stagnant.

“There is no trading happening at the moment,” Robbie Louw, director of Promethium Carbon, a South African carbon and climate change advisory firm, told IPS. “The international price for offsetting credits is very low at the moment.”

In Europe, carbon credits are selling for less than 50 cents, Louw said.

Without the carbon tax big South African emitters have no obligation to reduce their emissions or engage with carbon offsetting programmes, Carl Wesselink, director of SouthSouthNorth, a Cape Town based non-profit organisation that focuses on climate change and development, told IPS.

The carbon tax should change that.

The proposed carbon tax and offset legislation will increase demand and price for carbon credits, Roland Hunter, a consultant at C4 EcoSolutions, told IPS.  C4 EcoSolutions is a firm that consults on a government offset project which involves reforesting degraded parts of the Eastern Cape province with Spekboom, a succulent tree with a high potential for capturing carbon.

Flagship offset project faces challenges

South Africa’s flagship carbon offsetting initiative, the Kuyasa CDM Pilot Project, which is registered with internationally recognised credit scheme the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) — established under the Kyoto Protocol — has been slow to issue carbon credits.

The initiative involved retrofitting 2,300 low-cost homes in Khayelitsha, a semi-informal township outside Cape Town, with solar water heaters, ceiling insulation, and energy efficient light bulbs.

These energy efficient measures save 7,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. But despite being registered with the CDM in 2005, and being completed in 2010, the award-winning project has not yet issued any carbon credits.

A combination of bureaucratic red tape, from local and national government, combined with the CDM’s protracted verification process, is to blame for the lack of credit trading at Kuyasa, said Wesselink, whose organisation developed the project and, as a partner to the City of Cape Town, is responsible for trading the carbon credits.

An estimated 10,000 CER (Certified Emissions Reduction) credits should be issued this year, he said.

The money from the credit sales will go into maintenance costs, which are currently being shouldered by SouthSouthNorth with donor funds.

The funds are needed since the solar water heaters made by a Chinese company, and numbering 1,500, are prone to rusting and leaks, and have a short-life span, Zuko Ndamane, project manger for the Kuyasa CDM project, told IPS.

“A day, maybe about 10 people will come and report their geyser is leaking,” he said. “If I’m [not in the office] they’ll go to my house.”

When the credits are sold, the project will invest in replacing the rusting geysers with units from a South African company, which have a 20-year lifespan, he said.

Kuyasa was not established to make a financial profit. With the project costing about 3.5 million dollars it would take decades to recoup the costs through selling carbon credits alone.

“Putting solar water heaters and insulation in houses is something government, or someone, should be funding — it’s a good thing,” said Wesselink. “A project like Kuyasa will happen because it’s a social good but it won’t happen because carbon is a kicker.”

The return on investment from a public health and social development perspective is worth the financial outlay. But such projects need to be done at a larger scale to make financial sense, he explained.

Tax still to be finalised

The carbon tax and associated offset options should see an uptick in trade for carbon offsetting projects in South Africa. But industry remains concerned about the looming tax, especially state-owned power supplier Eskom.

Eskom would not be able to absorb increased production costs from the carbon tax, Gina Downes, Eskom’s corporate consultant for environmental economics, told IPS.

“It’s unfortunately not like we can switch off any of our production, particularly now with the low reserve margin,” said Downes. “We probably can’t, in the short-term, even try to optimise based on emissions.”

The utility has been in talks with National Treasury about ways to account for the costs associated with the implementation of the Department of Energy’s 2010 Integrated Resource Plan, which lays the path for the share of coal-fired electricity generation in South Africa to drop from around 90 percent in 2010 to 65 percent in 2030, Downes added.

Analysts expect to see some changes in the final tax related to its impact on the national utility.

“I think there may be substantial changes in [the tax’s design], especially relating to the Eskom emissions,” said Louw, of Promethium Carbon. “That’s the thing that has got the biggest impact on the economy.”

South Africa is battling to reduce its cases of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) with the success rate for those on treatment at about 40 percent. Miriam Mannak/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
CAPE TOWN, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

Despite an increase in diagnosis times, South Africa is facing a growing drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) burden as nationally there remains a large gap between the number of patients diagnosed with multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and those who start treatment.

Between 2007 and 2012, recorded cases of MDR-TB, which is resistant to at least two of the primary drugs used to combat standard TB, almost doubled.

South Africa has improved its ability to test for drug-resistant TB by introducing GeneXpert, a rapid testing machine that can diagnose TB in sputum samples in less than two hours.“We have in South Africa one of the only rising epidemics of drug-sensitive TB and drug-resistant TB. And we are not doing very well at detecting it and treating it.” -- Gilles van Cutsem, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

But in 2012, just 42 percent of patients diagnosed with MDR-TB began treatment, according to government figures. The success rate for those on treatment is about 40 percent.

“If we don’t do something about it now, MDR-TB is going to become XDR-TB [extensively drug-resistant TB],” Dr. Jennifer Hughes, a drug-resistant TB doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), told IPS. XDR-TB is a strain of TB resistant to at least four of the main TB drugs.

“If we don’t start focusing on how we treat XDR-TB properly as well, we’re just going to drive further and further resistance as we go.”

Treatment Gap

Most of South Africa’s provinces have increased their treatment capacity for MDR-TB patients after the government introduced a 2011 framework for decentralising MDR-TB care. This allows patients to start treatment at sites closer to their homes instead of the country’s few specialised TB hospitals, where a typical stay is six months.

But provision of treatment at primary healthcare level needs to increase, Dr. Norbert Ndjeke, director of the Department of Health’s DR-TB, TB and HIV division, told IPS.

“[Decentralisation] is not moving at the speed we want it to,” admitted Ndjeke. There is no special budget for decentralisation and provincial governments choose how to prioritise their spending, he said.

The number of sites MDR-TB patients can start treatment in the Western Cape, Gauteng, Eastern Cape, and the Free State provinces has quadrupled due to decentralisation. The number of sites in the Western Cape, for instance, went from four to 17, while Gauteng now has five treatment sites instead of one.

Limpopo Province has not added new facilities, while North West and the Northern Cape provinces have doubled available treatment initiation sites, going from one to two, and two to four, respectively.

When properly implemented, decentralisation can cut the treatment gap.

In Khayelitsha, a large semi-informal township on the fringes of Cape Town, a combination of quicker testing and decentralisation has led to the time between diagnosis and treatment for drug-resistant TB dropping from 73 days to just seven days between 2007 and 2013, according to data by MSF. Ninety-one percent of patients diagnosed with MDR-TB in Khayelitsha in 2013 began treatment.

Ndjeke noted that provisional national data for 2013 indicates that 10,095 MDR-TB patients began treatment. Figures are not yet available for the number of patients diagnosed during that period, but in the first nine months of the year 7,271 patients were diagnosed with MDR-TB, possibly indicating a shrinking gap between treatment and diagnosis.

Accurate recording and reporting of patient numbers and outcomes remains a challenge, and the government is working to improve its systems, he said.

Large Burden

South Africa has the world’s third-largest TB burden, after India and China, according to the World Health Organisation. It also reports the world’s most cases of XDR-TB, a virulent form of the disease that is resistant to at least four of the main TB drugs and has a treatment success rate of less than 20 percent. An estimated one percent of the population of about 51 million develops TB every year.

“We have in South Africa one of the only rising epidemics of drug-sensitive TB and drug-resistant TB. And we are not doing very well at detecting it and treating it,” said Gilles van Cutsem, MSF’s medical coordinator for South Africa and Lesotho, at a media briefing.

Doctors are concerned about the rise in transmission of drug-resistant TB.

When drug-resistant TB started emerging it was mainly due to patients not being able to complete their full course of treatment for standard TB, said MSF’s Hughes. But now most drug-resistant TB transmission happens through people breathing it in from others, she said.

New Drugs Offer Hope 

One of the main challenges for treating drug-resistant TB is that the available drugs come with side effects including nausea, vomiting and permanent deafness, which often deters patients from finishing their treatment course.

“The drugs are horrendous – it’s a terrible regime but it’s the best they’ve got,” Hughes told IPS. On average, patients need to take between 12 and 15 tablets daily for two years, she explained.

South Africa is running a clinical access programme for up to 200 XDR-TB – and pre-XDR-TB patients with limited treatment options for a new drug called Bedaquiline, the first drug designed specifically to treat TB in over 50 years.

One of the features of the drug, which is taken along with other drugs, is that patients get better a lot quicker, said Dr. Francesca Conradie, clinical advisor to Sizwe Hospital, a MDR-TB hospital in Gauteng.

“It’s the first in a pipeline of maybe four or five drugs that will revolutionise the way we treat MDR-TB,” said Conradie.

Based on the outcomes of this initial programme, South Africa’s Medicines Control Council will decide whether or not to register Bedaquiline for use for more patients.

A new regime of drugs for drug-resistant TB patients could be ready by 2022 based on the outcomes of existing trials, said van Cutsem.

Patented drugs limit patients’ access to public health care. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Dec 12 2013 (IPS)

Paul Anley, chief executive officer of Pharma Dynamics, one of South Africa’s leading generic drug companies, wants to sell a cheaper version of popular birth control pill Yasmin. But he legally cannot because German multinational Bayer has patent protection on the drug in South Africa, even though its initial patent expired in 2010.

Generic versions of the contraceptive are available in the United States and Europe, where Bayer’s patent has been revoked.

Anley says South Africa’s patent system makes it easy for multinational pharmaceutical companies to make minor changes to their products and get multiple patents, each spanning 20 years, and keep generics off the market.

“Multinational pharmaceutical companies undertake a process of what we call patent ‘evergreening,’” Anley told IPS. “They will literally flood the patent office with hundreds of patents for every single molecule or product they sell, and they do it over a protracted period.”

Pharma Dynamics lost a court case against Bayer over the validity of Bayer’s patent, which relates to the rate at which the drug’s active ingredient dissolves, in March 2013. It is barred from selling its generic and has filed an appeal against the decision.

“Bayer will continue to vigorously defend its patents,” Bayer’s medical director, Dr. Gené van den Ende, told IPS in an emailed response. Van den Ende did not comment on allegations of evergreening.

Since 2002, Bayer has filed for 11 different patents in South Africa for one of the active ingredients in Yasmin.

Plenty of patents?

In September, South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry released a draft national policy on intellectual property that proposes changing South Africa’s patent system.

Anley and patent reform advocates like HIV advocacy group the Treatment Action Campaign and Médecins Sans Frontières hope the proposals will curb the number of patents granted and increase access to cheaper medicines.

“We grant far more patents than other countries, both developing and developed,” Catherine Tomlinson, a researcher with Treatment Action Campaign, told IPS. “A lot of what we’re providing patents on is not actually meeting patent standards to provide something new and innovative.”

In 2008, South Africa granted 2,442 pharmaceutical patents, according to research by Carlos Correa at the University of Buenos Aires’ South Centre. Brazil granted just 278 patents between 2003 and 2008.

Supporters of patent reform point to the price difference between originator drugs in South Africa and generics available in countries like India – which has been strict in denying patents for formulations of new medicines – as a consequence of South Africa’s patent laws.

The Treatment Action Campaign found that generic versions of popular cancer drugs are available in India for between four percent and 44 percent of the cost of originator versions in South Africa, based on a comparison of 2012 prices.

India has made also use of compulsory licencing. In cases where government feels the price of a drug is too high, it can grant licenses that allow generics manufacturers to produce versions of drugs under patent protection without consent of the patent owner. The World Trade Organisation’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement allows for compulsory licencing.

As a signatory to the WTO agreement, South Africa can grant compulsory licences but has not done so in the past.

The draft national policy recommends introducing the use of compulsory licenses. But whether or not these are granted in the future depends on the interpretation of the courts, patent attorney Madelein Kleyn, who is the intellectual property manager for Oro Agri and a research fellow at Stellenbosch University’s Anton Mostert Chair of Intellectual Property Law, told IPS.

Long road to reform

Government’s draft intellectual property policy recommends introducing a search and examination process to the South African patent office that involves having experts assess the novelty or original merit of an invention.

Currently, those applying for patents in South Africa need to fill out the application documents correctly and pay the required fees. If a company or individual wishes to challenge the validity of a patent after it’s granted, the challenge must be done through the courts.

Intellectual property lawyers note that government does not have the staff required to perform search and examination procedures.

“The patent office, as it stands, currently lacks skilled force to implement such a system,” said Kleyn. “Patent examiners are highly qualified people who specialize in the different areas of technology and require an in-depth understanding of the patentability requirements to assess a new filed invention against the prior art of the specific technical area.”

Outsourcing this work to international or regional offices, as suggested in the draft policy, would make sense, she said.

Since patents can be revoked through the courts, and intellectual property professionals advise patent applicants to amend their claims based on foreign patent cases, the system in South Africa allows for strong and tested patents despite the lack of a search and examination process, Kleyn explained.

She recommended focusing on educating judges who deal with patent cases to make the legal system work more effectively instead. This shift would also be cheaper.

If introduced, the search and examination procedure would take a long time to alter the patent landscape.

“The system will not eliminate the weak patents that will be on the register by the time the system is introduced in say (being kind) five years,” wrote former deputy president of South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal Louis Harms in his comments on the draft policy. “This means that weak patents will still be around for 25 years.”

Anley, of Pharma Dynamics, agreed that the proposed changes would take time to take effect.

“We’re very encouraged that government recognises the problems facing generic pharmaceutical companies and has addressed most of them in the draft,” he said. “Our concern would be that the process of capacity building is a very long and difficult process.”

The Umgeni River system supplies drinking water to about five million people in the city of Durban, South Africa. But demand for water has outstripped supply for the past seven years. Pictured here is Howick Falls, which lies on the Umgeni River. Credit: Brendon Bosworth/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
KWAZULU-NATAL, South Africa, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

In a few years, residents of the eThekwini municipality in the port city of Durban in South Africa could be drinking water that was once flushed down their toilets, as authorities are planning to recycle some of the municipality’s sewage and purify it to drinking quality standards.

“We’re going through a crucial water shortage, which is increased by the water demand of eThekwini,” Speedy Moodliar, the municipality’s senior manager of planning for water and sanitation, told IPS.

The municipality relies on the Umgeni river system for water. But demand on the system, which supplies drinking water to about five million people and fuels industry in the economic hubs of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, a town 66 kilometres from the coast, has outstripped supply for the past seven years.

To boost supply in future, the South African government has proposed building a dam with a capacity of 250 million cubic metres on the uMkhomazi river, the third-largest river in KwaZulu-Natal, and transferring water to the Umgeni system.

But this scheme will only be operational by 2024 at the earliest, said Moodliar. “Between now and when the uMkhomazi [project] comes online, [wastewater] re-use will be our mitigation measure.”

In dry countries like Israel, Egypt, and Australia treated wastewater is used for industry, landscaping and agriculture. But worldwide few countries put it directly into their drinking water supplies.

Singapore uses purified wastewater to meet 30 percent of its water needs, although just a small percentage goes to drinking water and the majority is used by industry. Citizens of Windhoek, the capital of South Africa’s arid northwestern neighbour Namibia, have been drinking recycled wastewater for over 40 years.

In 2011 the Beaufort West municipality, which serves close to 50,000 people, began treating its sewage for use as drinking water after a vicious drought, making it the first in South Africa to do so. According to a 2012 World Bank report “The future of water in African cities: why waste water?” few cities in Africa have functioning wastewater treatment plants and “only a small proportion of wastewater is collected, and an even smaller fraction is treated.”

eThekwini municipality plans to upgrade two of its existing, and underperforming, wastewater treatment plants – the KwaMashu and Northern treatment works, Moodliar explained.

To remove contaminants and clean the water to drinking quality standard, a three-stage system that treats effluent through ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis, as well as disinfection by ultraviolet light and chlorine would be used. The treated water would also be stored and tested before being released.

The purified water will be mixed with conventional drinking water at a ratio of 30 percent re-used water to 70 percent conventional, said Moodliar. It will feed the municipality’s northern regions, including Umhlanga, Durban North, Reservoir Hills, and KwaMashu.

Re-using wastewater in this way will add 116 megalitres of tap water to the municipality’s supply daily. This is enough to fill just more than 46 Olympic-size swimming pools. It is roughly 13 percent of the municipality’s current daily consumption, and will provide an estimated seven years of water security.

While it will cost more to produce drinking water through wastewater recycling – about 75 cents per kilolitre compared to 50 cents per kilolitre for conventional treatment – the municipality sees it as “the best fit,” said Moodliar.

The municipality has touted the effectiveness and safety of the proposed system, but there has been opposition to the plan, including the submission of a 5,000-signature petition during the public participation process last year.

Citizens have raised concerns about the safety of drinking the re-used water. “Recycling of toilet water to drinking water is a death sentence to the general public because of health implications,” wrote Jennifer Bohus in an email to Golder Associates, the firm that produced the basic assessment report for the wastewater recycling proposal.

The municipality, however, maintains that the water will be fit to drink.

“The technology is advanced enough that the quality of the water being returned is high,” Graham Jewitt, director of the Centre for Water Resources Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and chair of water resources management for state-owned Umgeni Water, told IPS. “Many cities all round the world use recycled water.”

“About 14 percent of water use in South Africa is actually water that’s being re-used, most of it indirectly,” Niel van Wyk, chief engineer with the Department of Water Affairs, responsible for strategic water resource planning in KwaZulu-Natal, told IPS.

Citizens opposing the plan also said the municipality, which loses 36 percent of its water annually, largely through leaks and illegal connections, should focus on fixing leaking pipes. Others proposed investment in seawater desalination plants, instead.

The potential for sucking seawater from the Indian Ocean and converting it to freshwater for the region is currently under investigation. But the process of seawater desalination, which involves pumping saltwater at high-pressure through a semi-permeable membrane that retains the salt, and allows water to pass through, remains costly.

Umgeni Water, the state-owned company that is the largest supplier of bulk potable water in KwaZulu-Natal, is doing a feasibility study for two desalination plants: one on the south coast, adjacent to the Lovu River, and one on the north coast near Tongaat, Shami Harichunder, corporate stakeholder manager for Umgeni Water, told IPS.

If built, these plants would be the largest desalination operations in the country, each capable of producing 150 megalitres of water a day. By comparison, the largest desalination plant in South Africa, in Mossel Bay in the Southern Cape, produces a tenth of that amount.

The cost to build one of the proposed plants is as much as 300 million dollars, according to Harichunder. The required technological components, like high-pressure pumps, are expensive, he said.

Desalination plants, however, can be built more quickly than large dams and transfer infrastructure, and also scaled up in future if needed, said the Department of Water Affairs’ van Wyk.

Umgeni Water’s feasibility study is to be completed in December this year. And the feasibility of building desalination plants will be compared to that of the proposal to dam the uMkhomazi river, said Harichunder.

Excerpt:

South Africa’s 232-kilometre Umgeni River is clean upstream but the closer it gets to the sea, the dirtier it becomes. Credit: Brendon Bosworth/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
HOWICK, South Africa , Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Over the course of a 28-day trek down South Africa’s Umgeni River, which flows from the pristine wetlands of the Umgeni Vlei Nature Reserve to the Durban coastline, Penny Rees, a coordinator for the Duzi uMngeni Conservation Trust, witnessed the polar opposites of river health.

The trust is a nonprofit organisation that works to conserve the Umgeni and its tributary, the Msunduzi river. At the Umgeni River’s source the water ran clean and was good enough to drink for Rees, and the four volunteers who joined her in walking the length of the 232-kilometre river and documenting its health. Further downstream, after the river had wound past agricultural land and urban terrain, the water became sludgy and smelly.

“Sometimes you can smell it, like [we could] in Durban the last time we crossed the river,” Rees told IPS during an interview at her home in Howick, 97 kilometres north of the port city Durban. “You get to know the colour of the water – [it has] this grey, grungy look, and it stinks of sewage.”

The Umgeni River supplies drinking water to more than five million people, and is the main source of water for the cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg town 66 kilometres from the coast. Rees’s sojourn further highlights the work of scientists who have pinpointed pollution problems in the river.

Ongoing sewage sagas

Like other rivers in South Africa, the Umgeni is under pressure from untreated sewage entering it. Poor infrastructure and surcharging sewers in places like Mpophomeni, a low-cost housing settlement upstream of Midmar Dam, have led to high levels of E. coli and nutrients flowing into the dam, Simon Bruton, a hydrologist with environmental consulting firm GroundTruth, told IPS. Midmar Dam is a large dam with a capacity of 235 million cubic metres of water on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg.

While Mpophomeni accounts for just 2.4 percent of Midmar Dam’s catchment area, it produces about half of the E. coli and 15 percent of the phosphorous entering the dam, according to a 2009 study by GroundTruth.

Projections indicate that the sewage pollution entering the Umgeni River, combined with nutrients from run-off from dairy, pig and poultry farms, could lead to Midmar and the nearby Albert Falls Dam becoming “eutrophic” – rich in nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous that promote algal growth – by 2019.

When dams enter this nutrient-rich state, algae grows in them.

“A lot of the algae that blooms can be toxic to human contact so you wouldn’t be able to use the water for recreational purposes any more,” said Bruton. “The other problem it creates is that it significantly pushes up the water treatment costs because that biomass of algae causes problems for water purification, and it’s quite costly to remove.”

Overburdened wastewater works

Wastewater treatment plants that empty treated effluent into the river are also oversubscribed, adding to contamination issues. At four of the plants operated by state-owned company Umgeni Water, compliance rates for the quality of treated water pumped into the river dropped to 71.6 percent in June 2013, according to an Umgeni Water audit report. A compliance rate of 95 percent is considered acceptable.

The overall lack of compliance was chiefly due to problems at the Darvill plant, which treats industrial and domestic wastewater from the city of Pietermaritzburg.

The Darvill plant is overloaded, Shami Harichunder, corporate stakeholder manager for Umgeni Water, told IPS. The company has put out a tender valued at millions of dollars to increase the plant’s capacity by over 50 percent, and has spent about 500,000 dollars on additional aeration facilities, which are soon to be commissioned, he said.

Companies that pump industrial effluent to the plant, and fail to meet their permit obligations for the quality of effluent they discharge, also “significantly” affect the plant’s ability to process wastewater, Harichunder said.

However, compliance at the Howick plant, which is running near to full capacity, was at 90 percent for June 2013.

Downstream pollution

Earlier this year, the Umgeni River made headlines as “one of (the) dirtiest” rivers in South Africa, based on the release of a study for South Africa’s Water Research Commission. The study analysed levels of viral and bacterial contaminants in the section of the river that stretches from Inanda Dam, close to Hillcrest, to the river mouth in Durban.

The researchers found bacteria, including salmonella and shigella, as well as viruses, such as Hepatitis B, in every sample they took.

Many of the bacteria and viruses found in the samples are potentially pathogenic to humans and have demonstrated the ability to kill human tissue cultures, one of the study’s authors Johnson Lin, who is based at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, told IPS.

The river water failed to meet the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s water quality guidelines for recreational and drinking use. The results “would raise concerns for people who may consume water directly from the river without any form of treatment,” the researchers concluded.

Lin points to outbreaks of diarrhoea as a potential risk to those who drink contaminated river water. And the paper highlights that in South Africa, 2.6 percent of all deaths are attributable to unsafe water supplies, and inadequate sanitation facilities and hygiene.

River shows its strength

During their month-long sojourn, Rees and her team documented other negative impacts on the important river. They saw the detrimental effects of sand mining operations, illegal dumping of trash on the river’s banks, along with the proliferation of invasive aquatic plants that thrive in high nutrient conditions created from agricultural run-off and sewage contamination.

Despite this, Rees was struck by the fact that, based on the water sampling the team did, water quality could once again improve in sections of the river that were not impacted by human activity for long stretches.

“The miracle is that if you give [the river] a long enough gap without any impact, the water returns to top quality,” she said.

With that in mind, Rees is advocating designation of untouched buffer zones between major contamination points along the river. “You’re always going to have a spill from a wastewater works, sooner or later,” she said. “At least then you know that if there’s a problem you need x-number of kilometres where there is no impact and the river will [be] clean.”

Excerpt:

There are an estimated 80 breeding pairs of wattled cranes remaining in South Africa, and the total population is less than 260. Credit: Ian White/CC By 2.0

By Brendon Bosworth
KWAZULU-NATAL MIDLANDS, South Africa, Aug 5 2013 (IPS)

On a winter’s afternoon in late July, potato farmer John Campbell and the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Tanya Smith surveyed the Umgeni Vlei Nature Reserve from a hilltop on Ivanhoe Farm in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.

Separated from Smith’s binoculars by a swathe of golden brown grass, the water pooled in the wetland basin that sources the Umgeni River glistens in the mild sunshine as it winds its way for 265 km to meet the ocean at Durban’s coastline.

“We’ve got two pairs [of wattled cranes] nesting in here at the moment,” Smith, a senior field officer with the African Crane Conservation Programme told IPS. A week earlier she had flown over the wetland for an annual aerial survey of the critically endangered birds. The birds can grow taller than five feet and are characterised by a bumpy red patch of skin between their beaks and eyes.

There are an estimated 80 breeding pairs of wattled cranes remaining in South Africa. The total South African population is less than 260.

To maintain Umgeni Vlei’s biodiversity and protect the regal cranes’ habitat, the South African government declared the reserve a Ramsar Site in April this year, giving it special protection as a “wetland of international importance” under the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty on the protection of wetlands.

“On the Ramsar-designated wetland we’ve had up to seven breeding pairs of wattled cranes, but the number fluctuates every year,” said Smith. “If you include [the surrounding] wetlands we’ve had up to 13 breeding pairs – it’s a huge proportion of the country’s breeding population.”

Wetlands on the land owned by Ivanhoe Farming Company, of which Campbell is a director, serve as home to up to six breeding pairs of wattled cranes. To help conserve them, Campbell has designated 800 hectares of farmland which buttress the reserve.

This is a protected area with nature reserve status through the KwaZulu-Natal Biodiversity Stewardship Programme run by provincial government body Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife.

“I think cranes and agriculture can co-exist,” Campbell told IPS. “Most farmers, I find, are conservation-minded.”

Wetland preservation key for wattled crane survival

South Africa’s population of wattled cranes dwindled through the 1980s, largely due to deaths related to flying into power lines, as well as intentional and unintentional poisoning, Smith said. Population numbers bottomed out in the early 2000s and have gradually increased since, thanks to conservation efforts and increased tagging of power lines, she said.

Tanya Smith, of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, looks for wattled cranes at the Ivanhoe Farm in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, while Ivanhoe Farming Company director John Campbell surveys the surrounds. Credit: Brendon Bosworth/IPS

The KwaZulu-Natal province is at the heart of wattled crane activity and is home to about 90 percent of the country’s population. Many of these cranes reside in the Umgeni iver’s upper catchment area.

“If we lose the birds in these territories then we won’t have a viable population in the country,” said Smith.

Since wetlands are the most threatened of all South Africa’s ecosystems, according to South Africa’s 2011 National Biodiversity Assessment, the cranes’ survival is closely tied to wetland conservation. At the same time, the birds serve as an “indicator species” – their presence signals good wetland health.

“If you have wattled cranes [on wetlands], you know you have good water quality and the biodiversity is in good stead,” Ann Burke, conservation projects manager at the KwaZulu-Natal Crane Foundation told IPS.

Stewardship protects wetlands and birds

While the Umgeni Vlei Nature Reserve’s designation as a Ramsar site offers protection to wattled cranes, it is only a small sliver of land of 958 hectares. Campbell is helping protect the birds, and ensure they have areas where they can breed unhindered. He has designated an 800-hectare segment of his farmland as reserve, and has agreed to manage it as such.

The reserve status granted to the designated land at Ivanhoe will be written into the title deeds of the farm. The protected land remains privately owned, and does not become government land, but the reserve status is binding if it is sold to new owners.

Such stewardship agreements offer longstanding protection against development and farming practices that could put fertiliser run-off into the wetland system, the World-Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) Susan Viljoen, who is facilitating negotiations between landowners and the government for the biodiversity stewardship agreements told IPS.

“It’s a far stronger guarantee that your land, and those farms, will be managed in a way that is compatible for the birds and for their breeding,” said Viljoen. “The main thing is that you’ve got this permanently open relationship and communication between conservation groupings and the landowner.”

Another landowner in the region has signed a similar stewardship agreement for 635 hectares of land, while the WWF is negotiating with six other landowners to protect portions of their lands, which total 7,569 hectares, said Viljoen.

“To someone who doesn’t really understand the detail of this process it almost might sound like that’s not very many,” she said. “But what I’ve learned through facilitating this process myself is stewardship is long and it’s slow, but the thing is – once it’s in place it’s forever.”

Two wetland areas on the Ivanhoe Farm that were drained and converted to pastures for cattle grazing decades ago will also be rehabilitated through the government’s Working for Wetlands programme. Although it could take up to 10 years for the wetlands to return to a state where they can support wattled cranes, Campbell hopes to see birds inhabiting them in future.

“We can see what we’ve done wrong in the past,” said Campbell. “And this is a chance to correct it.”

Excerpt:

Cape Town water activist Nokuzola Bulana says water management devices are not the way to solve water waste and debt for the poor. Credit: Brendon Bosworth/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 23 2013 (IPS)

Nokuzola Bulana has a problem with leaks. The water that drips from the pipes of the toilet outside her home in Khayelitsha, a large semi-informal township on the fringes of Cape Town, South Africa goes to waste and drives up her water bill.

Bulana, a water activist, says she fixed the leaks in January but water on the floor at the base of the toilet, which is inside a stall painted with pink, yellow and purple stripes, and pooled on the ground outside the stall, shows that seepages persist.

In March, her eight-person home used over seven times the amount of water the city of Cape Town gives indigent households for free in a month. Bulana blames the leaks for this.

“We don’t mind to pay for the water we drink or cook with but now the water goes down the drain,” Bulana tells IPS when interviewed at her home. “I love the environment. I want to look after the water.”

Bulana is one of many South Africans whose wasted water contributes to the country’s yearly loss of more than a third of its water – a shortfall driven chiefly by leaks, according to a 2012 report from the South African Water Research Commission. These losses cost municipalities more than 731 million dollars annually and drive poor citizens into debt they often cannot afford to pay.

South Africa is also the 30^th driest country in the world and could hit water shortages as early as 2025. It can scarcely afford to squander this resource.

Water saving devices denounced

At about 4 pm on a Saturday afternoon, there was no water coming from the tap outside 60-year-old Lusi Daniso’s house in Khayelitsha. This is a regular occurrence, Daniso tells IPS.

She claims she gets just 20 litres of water daily – not enough for the eight people living in her home – and has to ask her neighbours for water.

Daniso’s home is one of about 84,000 in Cape Town where the city has installed water management devices (WMDs). Housed in oval boxes with blue lids, the devices are set to provide indigent residents (those with a total monthly household income of 313 dollars or less, or a property value of 20,890 dollars or under) with 10.5 kilolitres of free water per month. This allotment is broken into a 350-litre daily allowance.

The devices cut water supply once the daily limit is reached, and turn it back on the next day.

The WMDs play a key role in the city’s water management strategy and are touted as a way to deal with the 9.2 million dollars indigent households owe the city. If indigent residents choose to have a device installed, the city repairs leaks, installs the device, and cancels their outstanding water debt.

But as IPS reported previously community leaders and civil society organisations have denounced the WMDs.

The devices are going into households with low quality plumbing infrastructure, Taryn Pereira, a researcher with the non-profit Environmental Monitoring Group, based in Cape Town, tells IPS. Leaks from taps, cisterns and underground pipes result in residents not getting their daily 350 litres, she says.

Technicians fix leaks when installing the devices but repairs often don’t last and residents in poor communities don’t have the money to pay for plumbers, says Pereira.

Pereira’s research indicates that residents are not properly consulted about the devices, cut-offs due to leaks and technical problems are common, and people struggle to get help from the city when meters malfunction.

“In this city, this supposedly world-class city, many of our fellow citizens, even once they manage to get a house that they’ve been waiting a long time for on a housing list, are actually, in terms of water, worse off then when they lived in shacks,” she says.

A fragile compromise

Because of the issues with water management devices, Bulana and other residents in Makhaza, a subsection of Khayelitsha, met with city officials last year and asked for a six-month pilot programme in the subsection whereby the city will fix leaks and freeze residents’ debt without installing the devices.

“We can manage our water because we are the ones using the water,” says Bulana.

Over the past months, the city has been assessing leaks and doing education and awareness in Makhaza in preparation for fixing leaks, councillor Ernest Sonnenberg, the city’s mayoral committee member for utility services, tells IPS in an emailed response.

But that does not mean devices are off the table.

The city will review all the houses affected by the project and analyse their water use, Sonnenberg says. “If residents are unable to decrease their usage as discussed in the meeting the city will review their individual account and install a WMD if necessary.”

White Rhino at sanctuary in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. Last year, poachers killed 668 rhinos in South Africa. Credit: Jennifer McKellar/IPS

By Brendon Bosworth
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Apr 18 2013 (IPS)

In the face of rampant rhino poaching in South Africa, some conservationists and private rhino farmers are lobbying for removal of the international ban on rhino horn trading and the creation of a legal market, to quell poaching.

“The trade ban is creating a situation where rhinos are being killed unnecessarily,” Duan Biggs, research fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at Australia’s University of Queensland, told IPS. “It’s taking resources away from other conservation efforts, and is leading to the situation where there’s a pseudo war taking place in the Kruger National Park.”

The South African government is exploring this option and could make a proposal at the 2016 Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to allow it to open up rhino horn sales. That would require support from a two-thirds majority of the 178 member states.

Proposals to lift the ban, which has been in place since 1977, have sparked debate about whether a legal market would actually curb poaching. Opponents worry that it would stimulate the black market trade that exists in parts of Asia, where rhino horn sells for 65,000 dollars a kilogramme – more than gold or cocaine – and is touted as a cure for hangovers and an aphrodisiac in countries like Vietnam.

But advocates say it would be the solution to the poaching crisis.

Last year, poachers killed 668 rhinos in South Africa, mainly in the Kruger National Park, which houses the world’s largest population of white rhino.

In an Apr. 3 press statement, the government said that the number of rhinos killed since the start of 2013 totalled 203. Poaching has roughly doubled each year over the past five years in South Africa.

If poaching continues at the current rate, the Kruger National Park’s rhino population will start to decline from 2016, according to South African National Parks researchers. Worse, scientists estimate that if poaching accelerates, Africa’s rhino could be extinct in the wild in just 20 years.

A tightly-regulated market would offer a way to supply the persistent Asian demand, and, if properly administered, prove cheaper, safer and more reliable for buyers than purchasing from criminal cartels. This would draw buyers away from the illegal market, explains Biggs, who co-authored a paper in the March issue of the journal Science calling for the introduction of legal trade.

“The idea is to cut (illegal traders) out of the market,” Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, an independent conservation economist who researches the rhino horn trade, told IPS. “They are dealing in a lot of other products. If it becomes unattractive to them they’ll simply switch to something else.”

The legal trade in crocodile skins, which during the 1980s led to a shift toward sustainable crocodile ranching instead of the slaughter of wild crocodiles, is an example of how legal trade can drive conservation, says Biggs.

To be effective, advocates propose that an independent body – a central selling organisation – that reports to CITES would run the market and sell horns to registered buyers. Part of the revenue from sales would be channelled to conservation efforts and used to strengthen anti-poaching initiatives.

Rhino horn is made of keratin, found in human hair, and grows back after being cut. Sedating rhino and shaving off their horns carries “completely minimal risk” to the animals, says Biggs.

To stop poached horn from entering the legal market, suppliers can fit legal horns with traceable transponders and DNA signatures for less than 200 dollars per horn, he says.

Not convinced

But various conservation groups oppose legal trade. They argue that legalisation could drive demand for rhino horn to a point the market could not sustain and create a situation where the criminal market would flourish alongside the legal one, as is the case with abalone, which is severely threatened by poaching in South Africa.

Mary Rice, executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency, an independent organisation committed to investigating and exposing environmental crime, points to the spike in illegal ivory sales in China after it legally bought stockpiles of ivory from Botswana, South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe in 2008.

The Chinese government bought ivory for 157 dollars/kg but sells it for up to 1,500 dollars/kg. Retailers, however, sell ivory products for as much as 7,000 dollars, according to an Environmental Investigation Agency report.

But as much as 90 percent of the ivory that enters the market in China is illegal, according to the report.

“Legal ivory is now more expensive than illegal ivory, and what you have is the biggest upsurge in poaching since the (1989) ban (on international ivory trade),” Rice told IPS.

Legal trade opponents are concerned governments would not be able to adequately police the rhino horn market, and cite corruption as a problem. Last year, police arrested four South African National Parks officials in connection with rhino poaching, who are out on bail.

Accurate figures for the actual size of the rhino horn market are not available.

“We don’t know what the demand is, and if we open trade we don’t know what the demand will become,” Allison Thomson, director of activist group Outraged SA Citizens Against Poaching, told IPS. “If you open that door and increase the demand, if it’s the wrong thing to do, to close that door is going to be absolutely impossible.”