South Africa is a water scarce country, the 30th driest in the world. The country is facing a water crisis resulting from the increasing severity of droughts and erratic rainfall events, driven by climatic variation, and insufficient maintenance of and investment in water infrastructure. This has significant impacts on economic growth and well-being[1]. The problem is compounded by the lack of secured strategic water source areas (SWSAs)[2]. Well managed SWSAs have the potential to secure water sources, to ensure water sustainability and sustainable development. With climate projections indicating the likelihood of increasing rainfall variability and drought in the country, there is an urgent need to safeguard, rehabilitate and protect key SWSAs. The project aims to support the achievement of the targets for securing SWSAs that are set out in South Africa's 2019-2024 Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF), the South African government's 5-year plan. This will take place through a coordinated, comprehensive approach which includes scaling up of approaches piloted in two recent Global Environment Facility (GEF) funded projects, entitled Mainstreaming Biodiversity into Land Use Regulation and Management at the Municipal Scale (2015 - 2020 GEF 5), and Ecological Infrastructure for Water Security (2018-2023 GEF 6). Components of the proposed GCF project are: i) developing climate-responsive mapping tools to inform decision-making; ii) safeguarding the resource base for water security through improved planning and regulation; equity and redress, iii) rehabilitating catchments upstream from strategic water infrastructure to free up more surface water and enhance ground water recharge, and iv) building natural capital accounts for SWSAs, and enhancing the capacity of decision-makers to use them.

[1] National Water and Sanitation Master Plan (NW&SMP), Government of South Africa, October 2018, page 2.
[2] “Strategic water source areas are those areas that supply a disproportionate amount of mean annual runoff to a geographical region of interest.”(Defined in South Africa's Strategic Water Source Areas Jeanne Nel, Christine Colvin, David Le Maitre, Janis Smith and Imelda Haines, WWF-South Africa, 2013).