Water security is set to become a new competitive edge, according to Helen Hulett, the chief sustainability officer at South Africa-based geospatial information sciences company Afrigis.

Hullett paints a picture of a future where ‘supply chains will be judged not just on emissions, but on water resilience too. Banks will need to understand water-adjusted credit risk, insurers will need to underwrite climate-sensitive portfolios with location-specific water intelligence, and investors will look for real impact and resilience’.

That’s where the company believes its new digital platform, Resolve Water, comes in.

Launched in May, the platform ‘brings transparency and actionable insights to businesses, helping them mitigate risk and invest in sustainable water solutions that have long-term, measurable impacts on their bottom line’.

The roll-out of Resolve Water is still in its infancy, with Afrigis collecting and consolidating data from the entire water supply chain – from catchment management agencies, water boards, water user associations, water service providers and water service authorities down to the reservoirs and water infrastructure.

Afrigis CEO Rochelle Mountany believes the platform will ‘fundamentally shift how we are able to understand and manage water across South Africa and the rest of the continent’.

This is just one of the ways the public and private sector are monitoring the many challenges facing water management on the continent – chief among them being climate-related drought, failing infrastructure leading to water leaks and compromised water quality, and systems that cannot keep up with population growth.

The Water Institute of Southern Africa believes artificial intelligence (AI) has a big role to play in water monitoring.

‘AI’s real strength lies in its ability to process massive amounts of data. For water utilities, this can transform how systems are monitored and maintained,’ the institute’s Lester Goldman and Ashton Busani Mpofu write in a recent online post.

They say that AI-powered irrigation, which allows farmers to use water only when necessary, can reduce agricultural water use by 20–60%, while AI tools can identify pressure drops or hidden leaks, saving precious water.

‘AI can analyse satellite imagery and weather data to predict floods and droughts. In disaster-prone areas like KwaZulu-Natal; this helps officials act before a crisis hits,’ Goldman and Mpofu write.

‘AI can also protect water quality. By analysing pollution patterns, machine learning models can detect contaminants from industries, mines or agriculture. In rural and under-resourced areas, where data is scarce, AI can still predict pollution risks, helping prevent health hazards before they reach communities.’

Anthony Turton, a professor in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of Free State, is also punting tech-enabled solutions to South Africa’s water challenges, including contamination.

‘The first step is to establish a digital platform capable of real-time monitoring of flow and quality from the many sewage plants that sustain any city,’ he said in a recent interview with Business Day Earth. ‘Once that platform has been established using internet of things [IoT] technology, three things happen. First, the regulator can intervene before a crisis occurs. Second, the baseline of compliance can be established and verified so that artificial intelligence can predict future crises before they happen. Then, once you have the baseline, you can calculate the cost of non-compliance.’

Last year, city authorities in Cape Town, which in 2018 narrowly avoided what Bloomberg called the ‘largest drought-induced municipal water failure in modern history’, unveiled a ZAR7.4 million central digital hub, which allows staff to actively monitor 401 sewer pump stations, 58 water pump stations and 60 reservoirs.

The tracking system allows maintenance teams to respond more swiftly to faulty infrastructure, to respond to costly water leaks, as well as to prevent unsafe water from reaching taps.

In Johannesburg, where more than a third of the water that enters the system is lost to physical leaks, a centralised hub called the War Room was set up recently to monitor, among other things, water leaks in real time.

‘The War Room allows for rapid deployment of resources to high-complaint areas and integrates data from all municipal entities for decisive action,’ the mayoral committee member in charge of finance, Margaret Arnolds, said at the end of May.

The council is also investing in smart pressure management systems and digital leak detection tools to reduce water loss and increase service reliability.

In addition, as part of its advanced leak detection programme, it has committed to installing 400 noise lockers in its pipelines by June 2025 to detect water leaks by identifying unusual sounds in the system.

And in the Eastern Cape last year, IoT connectivity service provider Sigfox SA teamed up with mobile provider Vodacom and smart meter specialist Macrocomm to support the installation of 150 000 smart water meters.

IoT networks, such as Sigfox SA’s low-power wide-area network, offer a more affordable, long-range alternative to traditional mobile networks, which are often too costly and power-hungry for large-scale metering projects.

Because the network is light on infrastructure and maintenance, municipalities can deploy smart meters even in rural or hard-to-reach areas without worrying about cellular black spots or heavy operational costs. And more smart meters being deployed means more data is gathered, leading to more actionable insights.

‘Water and sanitation data are essential for stronger accountability, increased commitment and investments, and more effective decision-making,’ according to United Nations Water (UN-Water). It has also underscored the importance of monitoring at a bigger, more global scale, not least because of climate-related risks.

It points out that the poorest half of the world contributes less than ‘3% of global water quality data points’.

‘Lack of data on this scale means that by 2030, over half of humanity will live in countries with inadequate water quality data to inform management decisions addressing drought, floods, impacts from wastewater effluents and agricultural runoff,’ says UN-Water.

That’s where South African satellite technology platform Digital Earth Africa is hoping to help. It says its Waterbodies Monitoring Service provides data for more than 700 000 unique waterbodies across the continent, drawing on decades of satellite observations, and it updates the data weekly.

‘The ability to track changes in waterbodies over the past 40 years provides governments and researchers with the long-term data they need to make better plans, prepare for climate-related risks and manage resources more sustainably,’ says Lisa-Maria Rebelo, acting managing director and lead scientist at Digital Earth Africa.

At the heart of its system is the Open Data Cube (ODC), an open-source software platform that simplifies the storage, processing and analysis of earth observation (EO) data. In essence, the ODC – hosted at Amazon Web Services in Cape Town to ensure data remains accessible across the continent – enables organisations with limited resources to access high-quality EO data.

Whether plucked from satellites or derived from IoT-enabled smart meters, the data gathered will go a long way to properly managing Africa’s water resources.

As Hulett of Afrigis says, ‘every single company in South Africa should be able to [press] a button and understand where the water is coming from, and why, even though it is raining continuously, when they open their tap, there is no water coming out of it’.

 Image: iStock Images