| Abstract |
Cities across the globe are facing water crises. Rapidly rising populations, climate change and ageing infrastructures are combining to create long-term water scarcity alongside episodic shocks when public water supplies fail. Around the world some 500m urban dwellers are currently estimated to live with water shortages, a figure that will rise to 1.9bn by 2050. This has far-reaching consequences for social and economic wellbeing and surrounding natural ecosystems. The problem is particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which is experiencing the fastest rate of urbanisation across the globe. In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, came close to being the first major city in the world to run out of water, whilst Lagos in Nigeria is experiencing an abiding water crisis. In the face of governments' failure to provide reliable water supplies individual households and firms invest in their own personal water supply solutions, ranging from investing in their own boreholes and wellpoints to access groundwater reserves through to greywater harvesting. Whilst individual supply solutions can provide a buffer to water shocks there are cumulative risks involved from a proliferation of individual actions. Over-abstraction, contamination and unequal access to water supplies within cities are particular concerns, with fiscal impacts also prevalent. Recent research illuminates the reasons for the choices made, but the scale of the actions taken, the values underlying these and their relationship to wider collective resilience outcomes remain uncertain. The aim of this research is to establish fundamental insights that strengthen our understanding of the emergent tradeoffs and spillovers between individual choices and the resilience of particular places. At its simplest, resilience provides the ability to cope with sudden shocks or more long-term crises. In more dynamic circumstances, as experienced in contemporary urban SSA, resilience is better framed as the ability of an individual, system or society to adapt and, where necessary, transform to new circumstances. However, our understanding of how these processes of transformation play out in practice and influence the longer-term resilience of particular places to climatic, social or economic shocks remains acutely underdeveloped. Critical to this is an appreciation of the interplay between individual choice and collective outcome. The research has three objectives. Firstly, to strengthen our knowledge of the extent to which individual water supply choices are influencing collective social, economic and ecological outcomes in four key cities (Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, Lagos and Windhoek). Secondly, to understand the conditions, norms and values that frame individual capacities to act in order to develop more effective everyday governance practices for a collective urban resilience. Thirdly, to develop new conceptual insights on urban water resilience in the face of natural and man-made shocks, through the development of an international community of engaged researchers and stakeholders. The 7-year programme uses a novel mixed methods cross-cultural approach to explore this theme and develop strong practical partnerships within each city. Through comparative research it examines how individual and regulatory responses to water stress influence the resilience of each city and its inhabitants to potential shocks. The Fellowship will generate new understandings of the factors shaping the resilience of cities and contributes to the development of new models of urban development aligned to the needs of SSA. The Fellowship has been developed in collaboration with local actors and with global stakeholders, such as UN-Habitat, promoting real impact. It will inform urban water management practices (particularly of groundwater), support resilience agendas in the four cities and directly contribute to SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation and 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. |
