From Day Zero to Ramsar City!

by Vanessa Farr

On November 11th, 2022, Cape Town received official designation as a Ramsar City – the first in South Africa, and only the second African city, after Ghar el Mehl in Tunisia, whose wetlands are recognised to be of international importance.

Like Cape Town, Ghar el Mehl is a coastal wetlands city. It faces many of the same challenges as Cape Town – and indeed, many cities that have already received designation as wetlands of global importance. While its municipality has been recognised for its good efforts to protect the ecological diversity of its wetlands, our Ramsar City sibling in the north also struggles with inadequate wastewater treatment, agricultural runoff, unsustainable fishing, and poor or non-existent town planning that results in illegal construction and encroachment on features like sand dunes that could protect landscapes from some of the effects of climate change.

Still an apartheid City

The big difference between Africa’s first two Ramsar Cities, however, is that Ghar el Mehl is a small farming town. Cape Town, by contrast, is a large, ever-growing city that is now home to a population of close to 5 million, of whom nearly 2 million are unhoused. The City remains deeply scarred by apartheid planning and decision-making, including a terrible backlog in the provision of affordable housing. While the wealthy live magnificently, hundreds of thousands of people barely survive in informal settlements and shacks erected illegally in backyards. This problem keeps growing: the City’s Integrated Human Settlements Sector Plan, published in January 2022, estimates that 53% of new dwellings erected each year between 2020 and 2040 will be informal and precarious.

Such shelters entirely lack the infrastructure necessary for adequate water, sanitation, drainage and solid waste management; and far too many households have to share a tap. Yet these realities haven’t stopped the City from trying out various punitive measures to control water usage, entrenching the City’s history of water apartheid.

Impacts of flood-drought cycles

Many of the City’s inadequate shelters arise on ‘wasteland’ that is actually wetlands. Such areas have remained undeveloped because they flood in a winter with good rains. They are essential in the winter rains to catch and sink water that replenishes our coastal aquifers and nourishes wetland ecologies. They also safeguard us against rising sea levels.

But Cape Town’s wetlands, like urban wetlands around the world, have historically been dumping grounds for the poor and marginal. In the dry summer months, to someone desperate to find a place to set up a shack, these “empty” spaces in and around the City are a temptation. People construct what shelter they can on them; and then year after year, face flooding. The consequences are severe. Floodwaters spread sewage and other toxins into areas crowded by impoverished people who are already in poor health and unable to cope with water-borne infections. The especially vulnerable, children who are exposed to raw sewage, may suffer lifelong health consequences from contact with contaminated water, including stunting.

How did things get so bad?

In addition to poor housing, austerity policies that severely curtail spending on public goods have been zealously implemented in the past three decades in the name of cutting-edge and efficient governance. One result is that our existing sewage system, conceptualised a century ago by settler-colonials who wanted all the modern European conveniences of their time, including flushing toilets, hasn’t received sufficient maintenance or expansion, and doesn’t come close to handling the amount of human waste we produce at present.

Nor, it turns out, were flushing toilets all that clever, or modern, an invention. As the decades have passed, they’ve turned out to be a really bad idea. The United Nations University calls them “one of the most unsustainable innovations in human history.” Humanure, or properly composted faeces, and urine, are precious assets for soil replenishment: but they absolutely do not belong in water! The UNU article linked above gives all the reasons why. One is that it’s virtually impossible to properly filter out the toxins in human excretions – or to do anything about the persistent organic pollutants, including pharmaceuticals, that water flushes out of our bodies. As a result, once we’ve used water in a toilet, it becomes a pollutant requiring expensive, energy-consuming treatment protocols that don’t work, especially in a City (and a country) with an unreliable electricity supply.

Our oceans are toilets!

Faced with the problem of disposing of water contaminated with human waste, Cape Town’s municipality, whose boundaries include the longest coastline of any South African city, has turned to the wetlands and the ocean. Through three outlets, it has pumped millions of litres of untreated sewage out to sea for many decades. Never a sustainable practice, these outlets, and the poorly-maintained systems that feed them, are contributing to poisoning our already-strained seas.

As a result of poor management practices, at around the same time as we were being considered for our new Ramsar City designation, every one of the City’s shallow lakes, or vleis, was closed for recreational purposes due to sewage spills.

Nature can’t, it turns out, just whisk away our bodily excretions. And a Ramsar designation, as well-intentioned as it may be as an incentive to increase the City’s efforts to conserve our wetlands, cannot make a real dent in the results of centuries of racism and maldistribution.

The politics of poo

Flushing toilets, connected to a buried sewage line, remain a status symbol and a luxury for the rich. One way to understand how unfairly distributed our City’s wealth and resources really are is to count how many toilets an average middle-class household enjoys: sometimes two, perhaps three or more. Meanwhile, Ramsar City or not, the poor have to live with open flows of sewage, making do with inadequate, stinky, toxic and unsafe chemical toilets that are often used by ten or even fifteen people.
Whether or not you can go to the loo with dignity is just one more way in which Cape Town remains socially and spatially degraded by the cruelly racist policies of the past. It’s no surprise, then, that inadequate sanitation has been a major political challenge for the City’s managers since 2013, when fierce public protests, or an ongoing state of ‘poo wars’, first erupted onto the scene.

Politicians have built campaigns around the undeliverable promise that every citizen will have access to a flushing toilet. What they’re really talking about, of course, is giving people access to infrastructures that we think of as dignified. And there’s no doubt that people need better toilets!

But there just isn’t enough water for a promise like this ever to be realistic; and this claim itself greatly complicates the work of raising citizen awareness about why we all, rich and poor alike, have to move away altogether from mixing urine, excrement and water.

Changing our collective mindset

The problem of a failing sewage infrastructure is even harder to tackle when our history is so present in our everyday City life. We may be starting to understand that we have to make urgent changes in the ways in which we use Nature’s gifts — but when unfairness stares us in the face every day, and we associate the flushing of our poo with prestige and wellbeing, what kind of educational campaign can be created that will help people come up with – and accept – sustainable new ways of managing our waste so that our City can thrive?

In the face of the myriad problems around our precious wetlands, it may seem surprising that Cape Town, the place that first invented poo wars and then made global headlines in 2018 because it came so close to running out of water during a prolonged drought, now has Ramsar City status.

It’s only the beginning…

As we let all of these complexities sink in, let’s continue to be encouraged by the fact that no City can receive City-wide Ramsar status unless it already has a Ramsar Site. We’re proud that it was citizen action to gain this designation for the False Bay Nature Reserve in 2015 that enabled our municipality to apply for Ramsar City recognition in the first place.

We’re excited by the potential of this designation; but with daily stories of sewage spills, illegal dumping, and ever-growing pressures on our wetlands and ocean, we are also worried. Will our City government think it’s done enough by applying for and receiving this status, and slow or stop its good efforts? Or will it, as we do, seize this as an opportunity to do much more, and quickly, to conserve and protect our precious wetlands? How can we, as citizens of this City, keep up the pressure on our leaders and make other contributions to safeguarding our wetlands?

Now that you know you’re a citizen of a Ramsar City, what will you do differently?

We’ve got lots of ideas, and look forward to sharing them.

Watch this space for regular updates on what it means to live in a Ramsar City that is also one of the most unequal urban spaces in the world.

Vanessa is a member of the Friends of Zeekoevlei and Rondevlei. All opinions expressed in this blog are her own.