Water Debt and Leaks Plague City Residents

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.

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.

Read the rest of my story at Inter Press Service.

Swale of a time at Platbos Forest

I learned a new word recently. Swale: a ditch on a contour which catches run-off. As an assistant team leader at Greenpop’s Reforest Festival over the weekend one of my job’s included inspecting swales to make sure they were up to scratch. I might also have been responsible for some very poor jokes (“swale of a time,” “swale watching,” “who supports swaling?”) but I’m kind of a geek when it comes to new words.

The festivalgoers planted 3,000 trees at Platbos Forest, which is the southernmost indigenous forest on the continent, on Saturday. We dug holes, shaped swales, and got our hands dirty. The new trees will help stave off the threat of encroaching alien vegetation and keep the forest growing strong. 

I was glad to be part of it.

Mountain Musings

The simple act of walking is a salve. It helps me stop thinking about the job, the money (lack thereof) and what’s next. I enjoy shelving my daily thoughts and focusing on physicality for a few hours.

Walking the paths that cut into the peaks above Kalk Bay and Muizenberg gives me the time I need to do this.

Lately, the proteas have been out and the winds have been quiet. High up in the rocks, looking over the Indian Ocean, a person feels calm. And that’s all I’m after most of the time.

Here are some shots from my recent constitutionals.

Looking onto Muizenberg from Peck’s Valley.

Protea shows its colours

Looking toward Simon’s Town. Someone tagged this pole.

View from a peak above Boyes Drive.

Would a legal trade in rhino horn curb poaching?

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.

My latest article for Inter Press Service News delves into the arguments for and against creating a legal trade.

Here’s an excerpt:

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.

Full article at IPS News and also republished at The Guardian.

Image: white rhino from TomFawls via wikimedia.

California’s carbon market may succeed where others have failed

Image: first of a three-part infographic about how California’s cap and trade program works. Designed by Andy Cullen and copyright High Country News.

This year, California rolled out an economy-wide carbon cap and trade program, the first of its kind in the U.S. There is a lot riding on the success or failure of this program, not least because California is the ninth largest economy in the world and is going it alone with cap and trade in the U.S. The Golden State also has a legacy of introducing pioneering environmental legislation that other states and eventually the federal government adopt.

In my latest story for High Country News, I write about how the state has designed the program to avoid the mistakes of the European Union’s carbon trading scheme, which has suffered from overallocation of carbon credits and subsequent slumps in the carbon price.

The story also highlights the concerns of a major steel producer, California Steel Industries, which, like other businesses, is concerned about finding cost-effective ways to reduce its carbon emissions as the carbon “cap” tightens in future.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Golden State forged ahead with the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program despite the U.S. Senate’s 2010 failure to pass a national program. Given the state’s history of implementing environmental regulations that later become national policy, a successful cap-and-trade system could serve as a federal model. If cap-and-trade in California “fails, or is perceived to have failed, then that could be the nail in the coffin for cap-and-trade consideration as a policy instrument in Washington,” says Robert Stavins, a Harvard professor who studies climate policy.

While its overall impact on U.S. emissions won’t be major, the California experiment makes several improvements to existing cap-and-trade strategies. It covers more sources of pollution than the five-year-old Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeastern U.S., which applies only to power plants. The European Union started the world’s largest carbon cap-and-trade program in 2005, but it had a significant flaw: the initial stage of the program gave away too many free credits, resulting in some power companies raking in windfall profits by raising electricity prices even though they didn’t have to pay for their allowances. It also contributed to low prices for carbon allowances, which provides scant incentive to cut emissions.

Mary Nichols, head of the California Air Resources Board, the agency steering the state program, is confident that California’s effort will be different. The program covers 360 businesses, which represent about 600 facilities that each release more than 25,000 metric tons yearly — enough to put a big dent in California’s total carbon output. The EU’s difficulty, Nichols notes, was that authorities didn’t have an accurate measure of the total quantity of emissions initially. California, though, has had a greenhouse-gas reporting requirement in place since 2008.

Full article at High Country News.

Chemistry 101

High school chemistry was not my strong suit. A good friend and I spent most of the time trying to make each other laugh instead of paying attention to class experiments. My teacher once told me that my friend (who went on to get a chemical engineering degree) could get away with screwing around because he was “smart.” I, on the other hand, couldn’t because I was “just stupid.” I like to think he didn’t actually mean that.

Now that I’m older, write about science, and am a fan of open learning initiatives, I’ve decided to revisit the subject. I’ve started an online course known as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offered through edX, a collaboration between MIT, Harvard and Berkeley. It’s called “Introduction to Biology: the Secret of Life.”

Moonlight Mass

I don’t usually attend mass. But last night I joined cyclists and skateboarders from Cape Town for moonlight mass, which involves spinning slowly from Green Point through Moullie Point and back into town. The full moon gave us light and the motorists gave us their patience. Here are some pics I took while freewheeling through an easy evening.