South African guidelines for WSUD
South Africa is a water-stressed developing country facing the challenge of providing basic services, including water, to its people. Rapid urbanization has led to concerns regarding social and environmental sustainability of urban areas. Water security is becoming a major problem, with most surface water resources fully accounted for and concern about poor water quality downstream of urban areas. The potential impact of climate change is an additional challenge.
The framework and guidelines introduce the philosophy of WSUD – a new paradigm in urban water management – and start to build the case for its adoption in a water-scarce country such as RSA, as well as providing a base for future studies. The document attempts to define what ‘water sensitivity’ might mean within the RSA context – including expanding the definition of ‘city’ in Water Sensitive Cities (WSC) to include a broader range of settlement types – so as to motivate for adopting a context-specific vision for water sensitivity. In this regard it suggests a strategic framework with four different components to enable the transformation to Water Sensitive Settlements (WSS) in RSA, and provides guidance on the various WSUD strategies that could be adopted to achieve this, as well as giving an indication of appropriate modelling tools. A policy review (including institutional and legal issues) was also carried out in order to identify obstacles to WSUD and to provide recommendations on how they may be overcome.