146 The Future of Water in African Cities
tors are sourced from two databases, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia 3.0 database and WorldClim database (Hijmans et al., 2005). • A range of indicators describing physical water availability in the basin (indicators 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17), which are sourced from the baseline data of Strzepek et al., 2011, and represent the period 1961 to 1999. As this baseline data is not historically observed but modeled data generated from the CRU 3.0 database, it comes with limitations (see Strzepek et al., 2011). • The projected range of impact from climate change on specific hydrological indicators at basin level (indicator 11). This indicator is sourced from the Climate Change Knowledge Portal and combines the results of 23 Global Circulation Models for three emission scenarios. For specific limitations associated with the baseline data, the modeling process, and the resolution of the models, see Strzepek et al., 2011. Water Supply Services The current situation of water supply services determines how much more of a challenge it will be for the city and the utility to deal with an increase in demand for water at residential and business levels. This set of indicators was devoted to describing water supply services at city level in terms of the following: • Capacity of current water infrastructure (indicators 18 and 19), which indicate how much of the lack of water access is due to poor infrastructure. • Quality and quantity of water supply coverage (indicators 20, 21, and 22) for current population, which gives an indication of how future demand might increase in terms of consumption per capita as well as population growth. • Financial sustainability of water utility (indicators 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27), which gives an estimate of how much more of a financial and management challenge it will be to expand coverage and supply for the utility. Data from most of these indicators came from a variety of sources (see Appendix 3), which leads to inconsistencies in definition and consistency across all cities. The International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities (IBNET) provided most of the data used to estimate the financial sustainability of utilities as well as water supply coverage and infrastructure. In cases where the water utility was national, it was assumed that it would service the main urban conglomerations and therefore was used as a reliable proxy to evaluate water utility governance at city level.