Water scarcity is increasingly staking a claim next to energy as a threat to the sustainability of large cities, especially in developing countries with limited resources. The recent crisis brought on by Cape Town's "Day Zero" drought created the impetus to expand on existing research on water demand management to include analysis of school usage patterns and key determinants thereof. With the effects of apartheid still visible in society and in school infrastructure coupled with the high water usage rates at schools, this paper evaluates the impact of school affluence (whether it is fee-paying or not, and self-governing or not) on water usage. We find that poor schools use substantially more water, partially because of poor maintenance, with mean water effi-ciencies of poor schools around 50% and 80% for affluent schools. Bayesian models were used to further de-termine which characteristics of a school are good proxies for the higher usage to help administrators and policy makers in the resource constrained educational environment. In addition to the obvious detrimental impact of poor maintenance, the results also point an incriminatory finger at early morning-school usage, early afternoon usage, and Saturday usage.T Abstract and references of paper accepted for publication in Sustainable Cities and Society. Published: https://doi.
Many South African schools struggle to maintain their water systems, particularly in the water-constrained Western Cape province, where the so-called "Day Zero" drought had intensified the urgency of saving water and increased the cost of supply. The problem is compounded by insufficient governmental funding, the lack of well-structured government policies, and a shortage of skilled maintenance staff at the schools. We evaluate the impact of a plumbing maintenance drive at 196 schools at the apex of the drought. Hypothesising that even the most basic maintenance could be a huge financial help to these schools, we gave plumbers a list of typical easy-gain repairs and restricted the budget to R5,000 per school, with some ad hoc exceptions. We then analysed the cost and benefit of these repairs, using data on the minimum night flow as recorded by smart water meters. We found an average of 28% reduction in MNF within five days of the reported maintenance date. The once-off R1,22 million spent on the 196 schools resulted in a monthly saving of R1,90 million-a saving that the schools could put to academic purposes.
Water scarcity is increasingly staking a claim next to energy as a threat to the sustainability of large cities, especially in developing countries with limited resources. The recent crisis brought on by Cape Town’s “Day Zero” drought created the impetus to expand on existing research on water demand management to include analysis of school usage patterns and key determinants thereof. With the effects of apartheid still visible in society and in school infrastructure coupled with the high water usage rates at schools, this paper evaluates the impact of school affluence (whether it is fee-paying or not, and self-governing or not) on water usage. We find that poor schools use substantially more water, partially because of poor maintenance, with mean water efficiencies of poor schools around 50% and 80% for affluent schools. Bayesian models were used to further determine which characteristics of a school are good proxies for the higher usage to help administrators and policy makers in the resource constrained educational environment. In addition to the obvious impact of maintenance, the results point an incriminatory finger at early morning-school usage, early afternoon usage, and Saturday usage
Poor resource management and infrastructure limitations make the effects of drought worse for cities in developing countries. One way to alleviate the impact without large investments is targeted demand management. This has worked well in studies that focused on some of the recent droughts, including Cape Town's ‘Day Zero’ drought of 2016–2018. Many studies have measured demand response to a drought at a coarse time resolution, but few have measured it at an hourly resolution or compared weekday with weekend use. In this study we evaluated households' hourly time-of-use behaviour in response to the Cape Town drought at two prominent inflection points identified by previous studies: the announcement of the Critical Water Shortages Disaster plan in October 2017 and the introduction of Level 6B restrictions in February 2018. The first major reduction was caused by residents reducing their usage by about a third in the early morning and evening hours on weekdays, and the second, even larger, reduction was achieved in the mid-morning hours on weekdays when home owners were not at home but ensured that domestic workers used water sparingly.
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