Tunisia’s Ghar el Melh lagoon, located in Bizerte, Tunisia, is a Wetland of International Importance and home to a relatively unique Mediterranean wetlands ecosystem. The city of Ghar el Melh – a name meaning, “the cave of salt” – has a unique natural and cultural heritage based largely around the resources the wetlands provide. It was declared Africa’s first Ramsar City in 2018 – four years before Cape Town, along with Ifrane in Morocco and the wetlands of Kigali, Rwanda, received similar accreditation in 2022.
Goedverwacht, a rural settlement in the Western Cape, continues to struggle with limited water access and a lack of potable tap water twenty nine years after South Africa became a democracy. Having been established as a Moravian Mission Settlement in the late 1800s, Goedverwacht continues to be fully controlled by the Church and the community has little influence over decisions affecting their development and access to resources.
While access to safe, reliable, affordable water for households remains crucial, there are other dimensions of water security beyond the immediate necessities of domestic consumption. In a water-scarce country like South Africa, these broader dimensions of water insecurity may limit development, health and livelihoods, making the problem of water access both technical and political.
Large areas of the Cape Flats were once seasonal wetlands, now lost to infilling and drainage for urban and agricultural development. Remaining wetlands are severely degraded. Many are entirely disconnected from surrounding natural areas and are slowly losing biodiversity value, but some can be rehabilitated, providing opportunities to bring back, or at least improve, highly threatened habitats and improve ecosystem connectivity.
Before agricultural and urban development, wetlands on the Cape Flats were mainly seasonal, drying up in the summer. Cycles of drought and flooding were crucial for natural wetland biodiversity. Today, seasonal wetlands have been infilled or changed to permanent systems, changing important lifecycle cues and threatening indigenous species including some that are endemic to the Cape.
As the medium of life, water is a boundless shapeshifter that patterns the Earth and all its living beings with its continuous cycles of ebb and flow. How do we shift our relationship to water? How do we learn, or rediscover, or reinvent in our current context how to restore health and take care of the water, so the water can heal and take care of us?