Today the Knysna Municipality unveiled the Vodacom powered Digital Water Tower Dashboard which gives greater visibility into water demand, system inputs and losses. This is an important step in helping us understand how efficiently the municipality's water system is working.

However, the dashboard data is not the whole picture when it comes Knysna's water security. There is another question that needs answering besides how efficiently the municipal system is working which is: how secure is the water source that the municipality is drawing from, namely the Knysna River, which is the towns main water supply.

This is where our Knysna River Risk Monitor continues to play a critical role.

We designed the river risk monitor to enable us to assess the river itself. It uses river-level data from the DWS to track changes in river conditions and provide an early warning indication of changing raw-water support from the river.

Here is the latest data from the river risk monitor

This is an independent assessment of data that is currently not available in the Water Tower Dashboard.

For example, today's river data indicates that a river flow of 110.6 ML/day was recorded at the Charlesford river gauge. Based on the extraction threshold used by our model, this translates to an estimated 44.2 ML/day extraction rate being available at the Charlesford extraction site. This does not mean that is how much water is actually being extracted - the last data from the municipality was ~16 ML/day. What it does do is give us an independent look at the river's capacity to support abstraction under current conditions.

The two systems, the new Water Tower Dashboard and our Risk River Monitor, serve different purposes.

• The Digital Water Tower tells us what is happening within the municipal water system
• The River Risk Monitor tells us what is happening to the river that is supporting that system

For genuine water security monitoring we need both since we need to be able to identify changes in the raw-water source even when the municipal system may still appear healthy.

Today the River Risk Monitor is returning Stable but Fragile because while river flow remains healthy, the flow trend is weakening. This is precisely what an early-warning system should do, in other words identify a developing change while there is still time to respond.