Editorial | Mandate water harvesting

The Holness administration appears to be on a wrong policy path with respect to water harvesting in major new constructions. It should reconsider its position.

First, the government says that it is in favour of individuals harvesting water for their homes. It plans over the next five years to distribute 50,000 polyethylene water tanks to rural households that meet a needs test. Around a quarter of the tanks will be delivered this fiscal year.

That, however, isn’t the full extent of the initiative.

“We will be including a rainwater-harvesting component with every single one of these tanks, meaning, we will provide the guttering and collection,” said Matthew Samuda, a minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, whose portfolio includes the water sector. “We are also going to be training young men and women in communities to do the installation and providing them with a stipend and teaching them plumbing.”

While encouraging small Jamaican households to invest in similar facilities in the face of more frequent and longer droughts caused by climate change, the government doesn’t intend to make it mandatory, even for the mid- and high-rise residential and commercial complexes that are increasingly being constructed in the capital and elsewhere in Jamaica.

Only days after expanding on Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ earlier outlines of the water tank programme, Mr Samuda suggested that legislating water harvesting wasn’t the government’s agenda.

“Anything that you insist upon that increases the cost of housing, there has always been a general sensitivity to space,” he told journalists.

TOO NARROWLY FOCUSED

While this newspaper appreciates the economic and political concerns implicit in that stance, we believe that the administration’s considerations are too narrowly focused and risk sacrificing the larger issue.

The last half a dozen years or so have seen a relative construction boom in the Kingston Metropolitan Region (KMR), driven in part by the government’s relaxation of density requirements. More habitable rooms are allowed in smaller areas. Developers can go higher. Multi-storey apartment complexes are increasingly displacing sprawling bungalows in old communities.

Critics, however, complain that infrastructure, including water, roads and sewage systems, can’t, and haven’t, kept up with the new constructions. It will, for example, take far more capital than the government and the National Water Commission (NWC) can afford at this point to undertake necessary overhaul of the old water distribution system from which over 40 per cent of the water it produces leaks before reaching taps.

This problem is exacerbated by increasingly erratic weather patterns, related to global warming, as was noted by Prime Minister Holness in March, in announcing the water tank project.

The October rains didn’t fall as expected, and in November, the island received only 62 per cent of its 30-year average rainfall. In December, it fell even further, to 47 per cent. The decline in January was even more precipitous, to 32 per cent of the 30-year average.

Some parishes have fared worse than others, but geographic distribution of the lower rainfall was wide.

The NWC has imposed water-use restrictions, especially in the KMR where over half of Jamaica’s population lives. It is not unreasonable to expect that the capital’s new high-rises, as they are occupied, will add to the pressure on water supplies.

BROADER PUBLIC DISCUSSION

But if we understand Mr Samuda correctly, guidelines on water harvesting, to be completed within the “next 30 to 60 days”, won’t make it compulsory for these new buildings of mostly expensive apartments, and expected high water-consuming residents, to have water harvesting systems.

Yet, the apartments in these complexes are not generally for people in the income brackets where the affordability question would normally be the government’s primary concern.

Moreover, the likely need for water harvesting, and general green practices in building design, was anticipated in the new Building Act that Parliament approved in 2018.

The law gives the minister the power, if he feels it appropriate, to make regulations “for water harvesting, including requiring provisions to be made for the storage of water run-off”. For multi-family, high-rise complexes, especially in the KMR, this should be mandatory.

The government, in this circumstance, might consider offering incentives for the installation of water-harvesting systems in complexes, the price of whose apartments are within a certain threshold. Or, the NWC, with oversight from the utilities regulator, could consider water purchase agreements with complexes that might have surplus water, similar to what is contemplated for households with excess renewable energy that can be sold to the national grid.

In this regard, perhaps Mr Samuda, even as he moves quickly, should make the draft guidelines publicly available before they are finalised and given to his ministry’s officers for the “appropriate sensitisation”. A broader public discussion might be worthwhile.