Three strategic water quality challenges that decision-makers need to know about and how the CSIR should respond

Abstract

South Africa is a fledgling democracy with a turbulent history. That history is a cocktail of good and bad, of success and failure, but it has provided us with a rich incubator for ingenuity. To me the simple question is what role should a National Science Council like the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) play in South Africa’s fledgling democracy? While this question seems simple at first glance, it is in fact highly complex, so it is my intention to unravel that complexity in a way that creates space for a fruitful debate in the near future. I will start that process by focussing on certain fundamental drivers that impact on every citizen of this country, in the belief that by understanding those drivers, we can collectively make sensible decisions about answering the question I have posed above. For purposes of my argument I intend to focus on three fundamental drivers that we all need to be aware of. I will present an argument for the preservation of our capacity to generate ingenuity. This logic will then be filtered through a conceptual tool that has been developed at the CSIR called the Trialogue Model, in order to gain sufficient insight for us to collectively answer the question I have posed, but more specifically, to identify three strategic water quality issues that decision-makers need to know about. The current social and economic wellbeing of South Africa has three fundamental drivers that have shaped the processes of development to date, and will continue to shape those processes as we move into the future. These three drivers are things we simply cannot change. They are so powerful that if we fail to recognize them, then all of our efforts at solution seeking will mount to naught (at least in my professional opinion)