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MAYOR APPLAUDS REVENUE COLLECTION ETHEKWINI Municipality has recorded a notable milestone in its financial sustainability journey, achieving a 95 percent revenue collection rate by the end of June. This is the highest increase hancement strategies Mayor Xaba has championed is the not being read include lack of access to properties. Mayor Xaba encouraged residents to use the Municipal App to upload their meter was pleased that the order for electricity meters will be delivered by the end of next month. “This will assist us in
50 percent debt write-off programme which ended in June. The ongoing deceased estate debt write-off initiative and migration of meter reading from line directorates (water and electricity) to the Revenue Directorate also form part of revenue enhancement strategies. The migration of meter reading has assisted in addressing the challenge of estimated bills as meters are now being read regularly and customers are paying for the monthly services they have consumed. Meter reading in the City has improved to an extent that only 12 percent and 20 percet of water and electricity bills are estimated respectively. One of the reasons contributing to some meters
ensuring that all properties are properly metered, and the City can start collecting revenue from them. Our main priority will be properties that have bypassed meters and those that have benefitted from the deceased estate debt write-off programme. We want all our customers to be connected to services legally and account for their monthly consumption,” said Mayor Xaba. To increase revenue collection, Mayor Xaba said that the revenue management team continues to engage provincial and national departments as well as parastatals to make payment arrangements on the debt they owe the City. mechanisms that made the Durban floods worse. Firstly, the warmer atmosphere and secondly, the Agulhas Ocean Current flowing east of Durban has been warming in recent decades, with more evaporation fuelling storm systems in KZN with moisture. And finally, wind patterns have changed and are favouring the influx of moist air into the province. The GCI-led research team has subsequently explored how storm systems impacting on the province may change into the future if global warming continues, and found that future rainfall totals may be even higher.” Sean O’Donoghue, Senior Manager, Climate Change Adaptation said this research will influence the City’s response and planning for climate change impacts.
readings monthly so they can be billed for the services they have consumed. “We have made technology available to our customers to make their lives easy. While our officials will continue to read meters, customers must also play their part,” said the Mayor. He called on officials to speed up investigations in cases where customers com- plain about irregular spike in their water and electricity bills. “I am happy that the Reve- nue Directorate is dispatching technicians to recalibrate or change faulty meters so that residents are billed correctly,” said the Mayor. Mayor Xaba added that he
in five years and within National Treasury norms. EThekwini Mayor Councillor Cyril Xaba attributes this success to targeted revenue enhancement strategies the
City has implemented. He vowed to continue putting pressure on the
administration to ensure that the City does not regress on the current collection rate. “Revenue collection is the engine behind expanding services. We must ensure that the spirit of the Masakhane campaign lives among our communities by encouraging people to pay for services,” said Mayor Xaba. Among the revenue en-
SCIENTISTS ATTRIBUTE FLOODS TO CLIMATE CHANGE
ETHEKWINI Municipality has welcomed the results of research conducted by the University of Witwatersrand’s Global Change Institute (GCI) that scientifically proved that the severe nature events, including flooding, experienced in April 2022, were due to climate change. By developing a specialised climate change attribution system, the first-of-its-kind
in Africa and the Global South, the GCI, was led by Professor Francois Engelbrecht and several
Recent research has attributed floods to climate change. Pictured is the aftermath of the floods in 2022 in the City.
partner research institutes. They were able to determine that rainfall totals on 11 and 12 April 2022 were at least 40 to 107 percent higher compared to what rainfall totals would have been in a counter-factual cooler world in which most of the recorded anthropogenic warming has
not occurred. “The attribution system is based on a so-called ‘km- scale” climate model that runs at spatial resolutions so high that it can resolve the deep convection that caused the heavy downpours of rain that led to the flooding
in Durban. This type of modelling is computationally expensive and was performed on the computer clusters of South Africa’s Centre for High Performance Computing,” said Prof Engelbrecht. He added: “The climate modelling clearly revealed the
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