The city of Cape Town suffered a severe water crisis in 2018. At the peak of the drought in South Africa's Western Cape, a randomized control trial at 105 schools investigated the impact of two behavioral interventions to encourage responsible water usage: detailed water usage data feedback from smart meters, and an interschool competition.

The water crisis that gripped Cape Town over the 2016–2018 period gained global attention. For a brief period of time in early 2018, it looked as if the legislative capital of South Africa would become the first major city in the world to run out of water. The case of Cape Town has broad implications for how we think about water management in a rapidly urbanizing world.

This study examines whether the presentation of billing information in a cognitively simple manner increases consumer understanding and satisfaction. 1325 participants were randomly assigned to different treatment groups and received one of nine redesigned utility bills or a standard bill. Comprehension and satisfaction were tested through a questionnaire. Restructuring the bill in a logical order, and displaying electricity consumption with separate bar graphs, had a positive effect on understanding.

Faced with the threat of “Day Zero”, when it was feared that Cape Town's taps could run dry, consumers reduced household water usage from 540 to 280 L per household per day over the 36 months between January 2015 and January 2018. This paper describes the events that prompted this reduction. We look at how changes in water use were affected by official announcements and by public engagement with this news via the social media activity and internet searches. We analysed the water usage of a subset of middle to high income households where smart hot and cold water meters were installed.

This paper presents an environmental flow methodology that was developed to accommodate shallow, highly dynamic micro-tidal estuaries found along the wave-dominated coast of South Arica. This method differs to most other approaches that primarily focus on larger permanently open systems having unrestricted inlets.

A survey of 2075 households was conducted in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2019 to estimate what respondents thought a “reasonable” monthly water bill would be for a randomly-assigned monthly quantity of water. Two different elicitation procedures were used to estimate respondents’ reasonable water bills. First, 830 respondents were asked two open-ended questions: (i) to state a water bill that they considered reasonable for the exogenously-assigned monthly quantity of water, and (ii) to state a reasonable water bill for their current water use.

Adapting to new climate conditions will require an intricate mix of knowledge, planning, coordination, and foresight. There is increasing sectoral evidence on the implementation of successful adaptation actions. However, the success of these actions when we consider the interdependencies among sectors remains debatable. This paper aims to assess who benefits from implementing adaptation options in a multiuser river basin to both climate-induced and demographic stress on water use.