In 2018, Patricia de Lille, the mayor of the South African city of Cape Town, was forced to make a panicked announcement.
Several years of drought and an aging infrastructure that could not keep pace with population growth led Cape Town to become the first modern city to shut off its municipal water supply and require residents to fetch a daily ration of 25 liters.
People queue to collect water from a spring in the suburb of Newlands as fears grow over the city's water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa, January 25, 2018. Photo: Reuters/Mike Hutchings
“We have reached the point of no return,” De Lille said at an emergency news conference. “The chance of reaching day zero on April 21 is now very likely.”
The apocalyptic-sounding Day Zero that De Lille was referring to was the day when water levels in most of the reservoirs supplying the city were expected to fall to 13.5% of capacity.
Luckily for Capetonians, the crisis was averted through strict water conservation measures by local residents and heavy rains in June 2018, so Day Zero never actually came. Since then, the city has implemented a program to remove non-native invasive plants, maintain infrastructure and extract more groundwater from aquifers. The city has also announced plans to build a desalination plant that could produce between 50 and 70 million liters of drinking water daily from seawater.
The crisis in one of Africa's largest and wealthiest cities has highlighted the need for better water security measures at a time of rapid urbanization, climate change and often under-investment in public utilities.
And Cape Town is not the only city facing a water crisis. In 2014, São Paulo, Brazil, experienced just 20 days of dehydration, when the city's main storage tank reached just 3% of its capacity, and in February of this year, Mexico City, home to 22 million people, announced that it was drying out in 2014 June could be before day zero – a crisis could be prevented by timely rain.
As more cities face pressure to secure water supplies for drinking, transportation or tourism, more developers, water companies and governments are investing in ambitious new water security infrastructure projects.
Construction meeting looked at some of the most ambitious.
1) The Sites Reservoir, California
An artist's impression of the Sites Reservoir Project. Image: Sites Reservoir Project
The Sites Reservoir Project was first proposed in the 1950s as part of California's ambitious State Water Project, which collects water from rivers in Northern California and distributes it to water-stressed cities. If built, the Sites Reservoir project would be the largest new reservoir in California since 1979.
Located west of Colusa in the Sacramento Valley, the new $4.5 billion reservoir would flood the Antelope Valley, stretch 13 miles north to south and 4 miles east to west, becoming the eighth largest in California.
The project is led by the Sites Project Authority, a coalition of government agencies. The project would require building two main dams on two streams that typically only occur during extreme storms, as well as redirecting water from the Sacramento River through existing canals.
The state of California plans to raise $875 million to finance part of the cost of the reservoir. However, the rest of the costs will be borne by the water authorities, who will ultimately be able to purchase water from the project.
The project was supported by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who used his powers under a new legislative package to cut red tape to expedite a lawsuit filed by environmentalists against the project that ultimately failed. The project is also opposed by a number of Indian tribes.
In September, the project suffered a setback when the California State Water Resources Control Board refused to grant the project the right to withdraw the river water needed to fill the reservoir because the Sites Project Authority had not yet provided enough information to the Army Corps of engineers about how the project would comply with endangered species, clean water and historic preservation laws.
2) Troyena Lake, Neom, Saudi Arabia
Digital representation of Trojena (Image: Neom)
Saudi Arabia is the third driest country in the world. Due to the dry climate, there are no permanent natural rivers or lakes in the country. However, the country invests much of its vast oil wealth in providing abundant fresh water in the desert – both for drinking water for the growing population, for agriculture and for leisure and tourism projects.
One of these ambitious projects is the Trojena tourism project in the mountains near the Gulf of Aqaba. The project is designed as a ski resort that will be open three months of the year, while the rest of the year will be focused on hiking, cycling and water sports.
The project is planned around a 1.5 square kilometer artificial lake, which is expected to be filled via a desalination plan powered by 100% renewable energy.
In January, Italian construction company Webuild signed a $4.7 billion contract to build the lake and build three dams. The main dam will be made of roller-compacted concrete, will be 145 meters high and 475 meters long and will hold a volume of approximately 2.7 million cubic meters of water.
3) Río Indio Dam, Panama
In late 2023, a severe drought in Panama caused water levels in Lake Gatun to drop to unprecedented levels.
This was doubly bad for the small South American country. The artificial lake not only supplies drinking water to around half of Panama's 4.5 million inhabitants, but is also the main source of water in the lock system of the Panama Canal – the shipping route through which almost 3% of all maritime trade passes (about 270 billion US dollars annually of freight).
The water shortage forced the Panama Canal Authority, which manages the canal, to limit the number of ships passing through. By February 2024, shipments were reduced from an average of 36 per day to about 18 per day, causing global shipping delays and forcing some companies to look for alternatives.
In a news conference in July, Panama Canal officials announced that, to prevent a repeat of the situation, the agency had revived a controversial megaproject that would invest $1.6 billion in damming the nearby Indio River and then drilling it A tunnel through a mountain to pipe fresh water would be invested 8 kilometers into Lake Gatún.
Officials said the project would allow 15 more ships per day to travel through the canal and ensure a reliable water supply for Panama City.
4) Havant Thicket Reservoir, Hampshire, UK
A visualization of Havant Thicket after its completion. Image: Portsmouth Water
In the United Kingdom, a country known for its drizzly, gray weather, water security has rarely been high on the political agenda.
But here too, concerns about climate change, growing urban populations and aging infrastructure are prompting water companies to invest in the country's first new reservoirs in 30 years.
Last year, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), the government's independent adviser on infrastructure challenges, published a report in which it calculated that the country will need at least 1,300 megalitres per day from new infrastructure by the mid-2030s.
In response, water companies have put forward proposals for nine new large reservoirs, two reservoir expansions and three large intercompany transfers. 11 water recycling systems and nine new desalination plants.
The proposed new Havant Thicket reservoir, located approximately ten miles from the city of Portsmouth, is scheduled to open in 2029 and will be the first to be completed. It will ultimately provide customers with up to 21 million liters of water per day, serving 160,000 people and reducing the amount of water that needs to be withdrawn from the chalk rivers River Test and River Itchen.
The project is being built jointly by water companies Portsmouth Water and Southern Water. They plan to build underground pipelines from nearby Havant and Bedhampton springs to fill the reservoir, build a 3-kilometer-long, 20-meter-high dam at one end of the valley to hold it back, and use the site's existing clay to create a waterproof base.
Mackley, a member of the Van Oord Group, signed a £167 million ($221.7 million) contract with the water companies last year after a detailed tender process alongside North Wales-based Jones Bros Civil Engineering.
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