Urban Water Crisis

Year 1995, Republic Act no. 8041 was enacted by the Senate and House of Representative entitled the National Water Crisis Act of 1995 in order to address the nationwide water crisis which adversely affects the health and well-being of the population, food production and industrialization process.
The passing of this act has given the President the leverage in the privatization of certain subjected water supply and sanitation systems that are found to be in under-performing and inefficient. Two years later, major concession agreements were made between Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) and two bid awardees who were now called concessionaires namely Maynilad Water Services Inc.(MWSI) under Lopez Group and Manila Water Company Inc.(MWCI) under the Ayala Group. Maynilad was given the West Zone of Metro-Manila as their coverage and Manila Water covered the East Zone.

In order to fully appreciate this whole study it would be helpful if we have a short review of the history of our country’s water services from the macro to microeconomic scale. I, personally, do not belong to the company said above but I do belong a similar industry. And on my opinion, Manila Water Company is the best local benchmark that this country has. I have in my dream of someday our organization, San Jose Water, would consider adopting their business and operations model without the need for privatization.

ABSTRACT: Brazil is known for it´s enormous potential of freshwater. Despite Brazil’s apparent abundance of fresh water - 12% of the world’s fresh water - these supplies are not evenly distributed across the country. Besides, overuse and pollution threaten Brazil’s freshwater resources, particularly in the heavily-populated coastal regions. This consideration is particularly true for São Paulo metropolitan area (RMSP), the foremost urban agglomeration in the Brazilian spatial formation. In Greater São Paulo (GSP), untreated effluents from industrial park and sawage are dumped into the Tietê River basin as it flows through the metropolitan area. Plus: water resources are wasted every day and therefore, the ghost of dry taps is a real menace. The intention of this paper, centered at geography discipline, is explore this problematic, considering technical, social and environmental aspects of this issue.

WATERS OF METROPOLITAN AREA OF SÃO PAULO: Technical, conceptual and environmental aspects
 
Chapter 53, pp. 1282-1315 of SUSTAINABLE WATER MANAGEMENT IN THE TROPICS AND SUBTROPICS AND CASE STUDIES IN BRAZIL, VOL. 4

In: Carolina Bilibio, Oliver Hernsel e Jeferson Francisco Selbach (Org.)
Fundação da Universidade Federal do Pampa e Kassel Universität (República Federal da Alemanha), 1ª ed. 2012, ISBN 978-85-63337-23-8

From 2015 to 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, was marked by fears of a water crisis in which the city's taps threatened to run dry. We argue in this article that Cape Town's crisis of water scarcity was a product of the convergence of ongoing contradictions in South African water governance as they came into contact with shifting infrastructural priorities associated with climate change. In its response to the possibility of a financial crisis brought on by reduced water consumption, the city withdrew the universal provision of free basic water (FBW) and reconfigured existing tariff structures. Both changes meant that the city moved further into commercialization and valuation practices in the context of restricted monetary flows. Based on an understanding of contemporary governance in South Africa as reflective of an often contradictory need to balance municipal budgets while also correcting for apartheid inequities, we argue that ongoing experiences of climate change are stretching existing municipal budgets in ways that threaten to deepen existing inequalities. Ultimately, we suggest that Cape Town's crisis is critical for understanding how climate change is reconfiguring existing governance dynamics at a planetary scale, thus offering insights into what form urban climate change adaptation may take in the future.

Si le secteur de l’eau est devenu, depuis les années 1990, l’un des principaux domaines de contestation des politiques néolibérales, avec une multiplicité de luttes pour la remunicipalisation du service, le devenir des entreprises publiques qui en sont issues est cependant mal connu. Cet article revient sur le cas du service d’eau de La Paz, en Bolivie, où l’accord avec un consortium français a pris fin en 2007, et où les coupures d’eau qui ont affecté la ville en 2016-2017, s’inscrivent dans un contexte particulier de refondation de l’État. C’est en effet en Bolivie que se sont déroulées les « guerres de l’eau » qui ont conduit le pays à de profonds changements politiques avec la victoire d’Evo Morales, en 2005, sur la base d’un programme de réappropriation des ressources naturelles et de refondation de l’État. La crise hydrique fait apparaître des tensions entre centralisme et autonomie des organisations sociales qui avaient porté le président actuel au pouvoir, mais aussi entre niveaux de gouvernement : autorités nationales et municipales, comités institués de résidents, ONG internationales. L’analyse de cette transformation d’une crise hydrique en crise politique a ainsi pour objectif de contribuer à une sociologie des politiques publiques par l’analyse de la « division du travail étatique » et des luttes pour le pouvoir d’État. L’enquête réalisée auprès des principaux protagonistes de cette crise permet de faire apparaître un repli sur des savoirs techniques de l’ingénierie d’État, susceptible de freiner la mise en œuvre d’alternatives écologiques.

From 2015 to 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, was marked by fears of a water crisis in which the city's taps threatened to run dry. We argue in this article that Cape Town's crisis of water scarcity was a product of the convergence of ongoing contradictions in South African water governance as they came into contact with shifting infrastructural priorities associated with climate change. In its response to the possibility of a financial crisis brought on by reduced water consumption, the city withdrew the universal provision of free basic water (FBW) and reconfigured existing tariff structures. Both changes meant that the city moved further into commercialization and valuation practices in the context of restricted monetary flows. Based on an understanding of contemporary governance in South Africa as reflective of an often contradictory need to balance municipal budgets while also correcting for apartheid inequities, we argue that ongoing experiences of climate change are stretching existing municipal budgets in ways that threaten to deepen existing inequalities. Ultimately, we suggest that Cape Town's crisis is critical for understanding how climate change is reconfiguring existing governance dynamics at a planetary scale, thus offering insights into what form urban climate change adaptation may take in the future. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The research presented in this article was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council in the form of a 'Governing the Nexus' small research grant. Additional support was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council-Department for International Development joint fund for poverty alleviation research (ES/M009408/1), for the project titled 'Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? Assessing the Impacts of Formalization and Technologization of Waste Management on the Urban Poor'. Thanks go to Emma Colven, Charlotte Lemanski, Saskia Greyling, Alex Wafer and Alan Wiig for their comments on previous drafts of this article. We also thank the three anonymous IJURR reviewers for their in-depth comments on earlier drafts of this article. 2 Commercialization entails the use of market-based instruments and institutions in resource governance. These include prioritizing efficiency, full cost accounting and cost-benefit analysis (Bakker, 2014: 465). Economic valuation entails the pricing of resources with the goal of inducing behavioural change-for example, reductions in resource consumption (ibid.).

La provisión de agua a las ciudades presenta un continuo desafío. Con la propagación del nuevo coronavirus se impone la necesidad de un exhaustivo y constante lavado de manos. Surgen entonces las preguntas: ¿Cómo podrán las ciudades, São Paulo y Ciudad del Cabo, garantizar el acceso al agua y proveer el recurso hídrico necesario para asegurar las medidas de higiene? ¿Tienen estas ciudades la capacidad para afrontar la pandemia al cumplir con los requerimientos mínimos de agua potable para sus ciudadanos en la coyuntura del nuevo coronavirus? En este ensayo se realiza una revisión en fuentes secundarias, principalmente artículos de bases de datos científicas, para entender los desafíos de estas ciudades que han enfrentado crisis hídricas.

Unprecedented urban growth makes sustainability in cities a crucial issue for policy makers, scholars and business leaders. This emerging urban crisis challenges environment-based and economic-based approaches to sustainability, and brings to the forefront the multi-faceted and critical role that culture plays in ensuring that cities are viable for future generations.

Culture provides fertile ground for new approaches to sustainable development at the local level. Urban Crisis: Culture and the Sustainability of Cities makes important contributions towards a theory on culture in sustainable cities, assesses the use of cultural indicators as a tool for policymakers, and includes useful case studies of Patan (Nepal), Penang (Malaysia), Cheongju (South Korea), and Kanazawa (Japan).

This book offers fresh insights into the role of culture in fostering community development, environmental awareness and balanced economic growth, and it will be of particular interest to students of urban studies, academics, and civil society groups working on urban issues.