City of Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille says the city plans to spend R315m in the next three financial years to deal with the ongoing drought in the region.

This came after Western Cape Premier Helen Zille declared the Western Cape a disaster area last week to accelerate the deployment of resources.

De Lille said the city will be accelerating emergency water schemes in the coming months.

“[This] includes drilling boreholes into the Table Mountain Group Aquifer and a small-scale desalination package plant, located along Cape Town’s north-western coastline,” she said on Tuesday in a speech distributed by the city.

De Lille delivered the speech at a Johannesburg Stock Exchange green bonds stakeholder dialogue in Cape Town.

She said the city plans to issue green bonds to fund projects aimed to deal with the effect of climate change.

A green bond is a tax-exempt bond issued by qualified organisations or by municipalities.

The bond’s tax-exempt status makes it attractive compared to other taxable bonds and provides incentive to tackle social issues such as climate change and moving to renewable sources of energy.

“We need to be innovative and diversify our financing mechanisms and these efforts will require partnership with the private sector,” De Lille said.

The City of Cape Town announced on May 16 that it plans to introduce level 4 water restrictions which would ban the use of all municipal water for non-essential use and limit residents’ water consumption to 100l of water per person per day.

On Monday, the city said its feeder dam levels were at 20.7% with only 10.7% left for consumption.