In a quest to improve the quality of of nation’s river water, the CSA and WESA have joined forces with Google Earth to help monitor the quality of water at priority catchments.
See the project outline below for a more indepth explanation as to the goals of this collaboration.
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Project Name |
Google Earth Community Based Water Monitoring & Social Change – People Caring for our Rivers |
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Brief Description of the Project |
To provide low-tech, high access river water quality monitoring to raise awareness and develop human capacity so as to influence civil society’s engagement in freshwater conservation within priority catchments. The People Caring for our Rivers Project will be launched in Gauteng, Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and Mpumalanga focusing on river water quality monitoring, capacity development and awareness raising leading to action taking for increased freshwater conservation. The project will seek to use the scientifically-robust, accessible too of Mini-SASS to teach communities about water conservation and water quality. The results of which will be easily uploaded to a Google-based media platform that will be used to educate and lobby local government from a citizen science perspective on water resource management. |
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Target Market |
Rural and urban schools (approximately 750 000 learners), local communities (100 000) in rural and urban areas, the sporting fraternity in the form of canoeists who use the rivers (20 000) |
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Date and Duration of the Project |
January 2014- December 2016 |
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Project Objectives |
To provide low-tech, high access river water quality monitoring to raise awareness and develop human capacity so as to influence civil society’s engagement in freshwater conservation within priority catchments. |
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How does this project relate to sustainability, Social progress, economic success or environmental excellence? |
The project will contribute to societal sustainability by contributing to the health of the country’s water resources, which are fundamental to growth and development, ecological sustainability (which also supports economic resilience), and social well-being in terms of health and sanitation. It will contribute to social progress by capacitating society to engage with knowledge of water resources management in a way that will empower them to strengthen their citizen voice within local government’s service delivery mandate of providing safe, potable water equitably. This capacity building will engender a participatory democracy key to the resilience of a young, thriving, successful democratic society. |
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What does the project support? |
Protecting People and the Environment |
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How can Paddlers get involved in the project? |
By contributing to citizen science and its growing repository by joining learners, sportsmen and women, community members and faith communities in testing and uploading the state of our rivers on-line. This will contribute to a growing citizen science picture of the state of our rivers, which in turn, will be used to contribute to changing practices of local government and/or identified polluters. |
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How will the success of the project be measured? |
Part of the methodology engages learners (children and community members alike) in monitoring their choices they make around water use; a growing visual picture of the state of our rivers on a Google Earth platform; the number of catchment management forums engaged in the citizen science emanating from this initiative; the number of local municipalities partnered with to see change occurring as a result of the citizen science being collected; the type of media platform created around both the citizen science and the partnership with Canoeing SA and their canoe marathons like the Duzi. |