The way we’re managing our natural resources is unsustainable, but it’s easy to ignore the warnings because vigilance is dormant in a society that fetishises prosperity.
In 2018, the time for polemics about the irrational consumption of natural resources or their finiteness was almost over in Cape Town, the metropolis facing a water crisis. A top tourist destination, South Africa’s second largest city was bracing itself for a notorious first, when the municipal water supply was to be switched off and residents would have to queue for their daily ration of water.
“Unwashed hair is now a sign of social responsibility,” Cape Town resident Darryn Ten told CNN, referring to the sad and unprecedented situation facing one of the world’s great metropolises, where the infrequency of showers became a marker of civic integrity in the city that ironically sits at the confluence of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. After the city’s contingency plan was implemented in stages, gradually limiting residents’ water consumption, unprecedented restrictions went into effect on 1 February 2018—domestic water consumption was capped at 50 litres per person per day, one-sixth of the average American’s consumption.
“Water is life. What are we going to do without water?” wondered Amirah, a young woman waiting her turn to fill a few bottles of water at the spring near Newlands Brewery. It was a question that worried the city’s four million inhabitants, who were already facing a long list of restrictions: the water left over after a shower, which couldn’t exceed 90 seconds, was recycled, washing the car or watering the garden was banned, and hand sanitizing gel and wet wipes had become substitutes for water.
However, the results were not as expected, with water consumption still 86 million litres higher than the target set by the local government. “It is quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care and are sending all of us headlong towards Day Zero. We can no longer ask people to stop wasting water. We must force them,” said a statement from the mayor’s office, expressing frustration that half of the city’s residents had not adopted austerity measures that could have postponed “Day Zero”.
On the other hand, the common denominator in residents’ reactions was outrage at the restrictions, with the rationale being: “We pay our taxes and therefore we should be as comfortable as possible,” noted David Olivier, a research fellow at the Global Change Institute at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
While the public and officials alike shifted responsibility from one another, the moment when the crisis would pull the trigger on the loaded gun seemed imminent—Cape Town was weeks away from Day Zero, when water levels in the city’s six dams would drop to 13.5% and the city’s water supply, except for essential services, would be cut off.
The chronicle of an (un)predicted disaster
“It’s going to be terrifying for many people when they turn on the tap and nothing comes out,”[1] warned Christine Colvin, a member of the mayor’s advisory board.
The fateful date, which was calculated every week, was originally set for April. According to the calculation released on Tuesday 13 February 2018, Day Zero was pushed back to 4 June, thanks to water rationing efforts, but also to modest rainfall that allowed farmers outside the city to forgo water supplied by the city for irrigation.
The crisis, which hit the city on a scale unimaginable in previous years, had not come unannounced—the shadow of water scarcity had loomed ominously on the horizon for more than a decade. Experts had warned that climate change and population growth could dry up the city’s water supplies and that additional sources of drinking water would have to be found. The city had not waited for disaster to strike. Cape Town’s water system was relatively sophisticated, with six main reservoirs, pipelines, water treatment plants and an extensive distribution network. In fact, Cape Town’s expertise in water and water management was among the best in the world, wrote Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security. Over the previous 20 years, in response to the looming crisis, the city had reduced water losses, made progress in reducing water use from its six dams, charged surcharges to large users, and even won international awards (C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2015) for the way it had managed its water use.
Despite these efforts, a 79% increase in population between 1995 and 2018, compared with only a 15% increase in water stored in dams, had already signalled the approach of a critical threshold. The three consecutive years of drought, which reduced the water in full dams by three quarters in 2014, were the icing on the crisis cake. This type of drought occurs once every 311 years, wrote Piotr Wolski, a researcher at The Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town in a study suggesting that climate change was already altering rainfall patterns in South Africa.
The cardinal error of officials was to assume that future rainfall patterns would be similar to those of the past, or that deviations from the norm would not be large, believed Kevin Winter, a researcher in the Environmental and Geographical Science Department at the University of Cape Town. “It’s like driving a motor car and looking in the rear-view mirror.”[2]
The Day Zero scenario was seen by city officials as one that could not be avoided, unless the rainy season, which had begun in May, brought more rain than in recent years, and the city bought time until the next hydrological impasse by continuing to invest in extremely expensive seawater desalination plants—which could have solved the problem for good.
Reading the future in the scenarios of the South African crisis
Speculation was rife about what would happen to the city once the water supply was cut off, and officials worried about how the city would be able to maintain normal operations without such precious fuel.
“The question that dominates my waking hours now is: When Day Zero arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?”[3] said Helen Zille, Premier of the Western Cape at the time.
A contingency plan was in place, but no one knew how well it would work in practice. On Day Zero, millions of people would have lined up in huge queues to collect their 25-litre water rations from 200,000 water centres guarded by armed forces. It was a reflection of the future of an increasingly arid and crowded planet.
An image of growing scarcity
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risks Report, the water crisis is the biggest threat facing the planet in the next decade. The 2018 report ranks water scarcity among the top five environmental risks with the greatest impact over the next decade.
Only 3% of the world’s water is potable, and two-thirds of that is stored in glaciers or unavailable. Freshwater scarcity is becoming an increasingly acute reality, whether it is severe droughts in otherwise fertile parts of the world or hundreds of millions of people without access to drinking water in geographically disadvantaged regions.
In the 1900s, only 200 million people (14% of the world’s population) lived in water-scarce areas, compared to more than two billion in 1980 (42%) and 3.8 billion in 2000 (58%).
Studies have shown that many of the world’s freshwater sources are being depleted faster than they can be replenished, creating one of the most difficult challenges of this century, according to Arjen Hoekstra, professor in water management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Economic development, massive pollution, the world’s growing (especially urban) population, climate change, water waste and a lack of political responsiveness are all contributing to the growing imbalance between demand and supply of drinking water.
Some 4.3 billion people, or 71% of the world’s population, face moderate to severe water scarcity at least one month a year, with India and China together accounting for almost half of the world’s water-stressed population.
Between 1.8 and 2.9 billion people face severe water scarcity for at least 4-6 months of the year, and 500 million people face a year-round water crisis.
Developed countries are not immune to the water crisis, although the scale of the crisis varies and financial resources allow them to find alternative sources of water. For example, in the United States, 130 million people are affected by water shortages at least one month a year, mostly in the states of Texas, California and Florida—and the Colorado River is on the list of major rivers that are almost depleted before they have finished their course.
But there are countries that are more vulnerable because their entire population suffers from water scarcity: Yemen, with 18 million people, and Saudi Arabia, with 20 million. Countries where a large percentage of the population suffers from severe water shortages throughout the year are also in a precarious situation: Libya and Somalia (80-90% of the population) and Pakistan, Morocco, Niger and Jordan (between 50 and 55% of the population).
Although Europe has water resources and droughts and water scarcity are not as severe as in other geographically disadvantaged regions, they are increasing, affecting human health and economic development. Increases in average temperature and decreases in precipitation as a result of climate change could lead to a 10% or more reduction in Mediterranean catchment areas by 2030, as well as changes in the frequency and intensity of droughts, particularly in southern and central Europe.
Behind the scenes of global urbanisation
Accelerated urbanisation is a defining feature of our century, putting additional pressure on the authorities responsible for the already scarce water supplies of many of the world’s cities. While economic growth in itself increases per capita water consumption, urban population growth increases this demand by concentrating large numbers of people in a small area.
The urban population grew from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2014. Fifty-four percent of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, and this could rise to 66% by 2050, with around 90% of the growth concentrated in Asia and Africa.
A 2014 UN report also noted an increase in the number of ‘”megacities.” In 1990, there were only 10 cities with 10 million inhabitants or more, with a total of 153 million people, less than 7% of the world’s urban population at the time. By 2014, the number of megacities had risen to 24, home to 12% of the world’s population (Tokyo alone is home to 38 million people), and by 2030 the number of cities with 10 million or more inhabitants will reach 41.
Urban settlements are water consumers. Although the world’s large cities (those with more than 750,000 inhabitants) occupy less than 1% of the planet’s surface, their catchment areas cover 41% of the world’s surface. As cities in the developing world grow faster, they must find financial solutions for infrastructure to transport water from long distances, especially when financial constraints overlap with geographical ones.
A study led by Rob McDonald, a research scientist at the Arlington-based Nature Conservancy, analysed water resources in more than 500 of the world’s largest cities, providing the first-ever global picture of the water infrastructure serving these cities.
The study found that 1 in 4 cities are under water stress[4] (using at least 40% of available water), with Tokyo, Delhi, Mexico City, Shanghai, Beijing, Kolkata, Karachi, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Moscow among the top 10 cities in this situation.
The fact that 22% of the world’s economic activity takes place in water-stressed cities shows that we are inextricably linked to remote parts of the world, and that the way water is managed has implications beyond local wellbeing for the global economy and stability.
A quick tour of the world’s thirstiest cities
Recent years have brought unexpected changes in the dynamics of freshwater reserves, affecting traditionally wet regions and creating difficulties even for countries with the expertise and technology to manage hydrological crises. Where the disadvantages of geography have met financial constraints, the situation remains dramatic and requires international assistance to create adequate infrastructure. This is the case of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, which experts predicted would be the first world capital to be unable to supply water to its inhabitants. Cape Town (which is also the legislative capital of South Africa) seems to have moved closer to being the first, but the situation in Sana’a, whose population is growing by 7% a year, remains dramatic.
More than half of the Yemeni capital’s two million inhabitants suffer from ‘”acute” stress due to lack of access to water and sanitation, while hundreds of thousands of others are under “moderate” stress. Relocating the population to a coastal area has been the subject of internal discussions, but remains a utopian project, both because of the economic costs involved and the social tensions it could create.
The water crisis is also a problem for most of Yemen’s cities, where the water supply comes largely from underground aquifers, causing the water table to drop by two to six metres a year. Water scarcity exacerbates the country’s instability: some 70-80% of conflicts in Yemen’s rural areas are water-related, resulting in 4,000 deaths a year, according to the Ministry of Interior.
Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia and a coastal city, is sinking faster than any other city in the world—by 5-10 centimetres a year, with 40% of its area below sea level—because of an acute shortage of drinking water. The mechanism is as follows: because the state cannot provide water for its 10 million inhabitants, illegal water extraction has flourished, drying up the water table and leaving behind porous soil. Building a piped system to bring clean water to beneficiaries and breaking their dependence on illegal groundwater extraction could be a solution, but it is still a work in progress—although the 2007 floods caused by the city’s faulty drainage system that failed to absorb water from heavy rains and river run-off were a stark warning, killing 50 people and leaving 300,000 homeless.
Mexico City, the capital of Mexico and the most populous city in North America, has limited access to drinking water. According to government figures, 20% of the city’s 21 million inhabitants do not have access to tap water on a daily basis. The situation is even more dramatic for those who receive water only once a week or every few weeks (1 in 5 people). The city gets 40% of its drinking water from distant sources, but the pipe network is worn out, with losses of up to 40% of the water transported.
The aquifers are almost depleted, so the city relies on a normal rainfall pattern and is virtually at the mercy of nature—any serious disruption to the climate puts the city on a trajectory for disaster, as Ramón Aguirre Díaz, director of Mexico City’s water system, admits.
Even Brazil, home to 12% of the world’s freshwater resources (and where a shortage of drinking water would have been unthinkable just a few years ago), has found itself helpless in the face of two years of historic drought. Water levels in the reservoirs of Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo (21 million inhabitants), have fallen drastically, leaving sludge in the pipes and forcing extreme restrictions on water consumption. Only last-minute heavy rainfall, which caused widespread flooding, saved the city from Day Zero—and the potential chaos that could have followed.
The conflict potential of water scarcity is growing,[5] says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. In Cape Town, the early days of the drought led to overcrowding at the area’s few springs, causing chaos and injuries. In the Brazilian city of Ita, fighting, theft and looting of water trucks during a period of severe water restrictions provided a spectacle that panicked officials in São Paulo, who know that such incidents could be repeated on a different scale in a city of 21 million people.
Local violence in the event of severe water shortages can create instability over wider areas, widening the gap between rich and poor communities/states. In the words of writer Christian Parenti: “No amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other”.
What could cure us of our selective blindness and provincial mentality is the reality that we are all in the same boat—we resist or we perish together.
A critical vision in times of crisis
Accustomed to using natural resources as if they were inexhaustible, we are unprepared for future scenarios in which water could become a luxury, accessible only to the elite. The water crisis facing much of the world and casting its shadow over traditionally non-arid areas is teaching us lessons we need to learn faster than we feel ready for.
One of them is that we are ill-prepared to deal with a serious imbalance between water supply and demand, and that any delay in taking uncomfortable measures will come at a cost that is difficult to calculate today.
When the 2012-2016 drought, considered the worst in a century, hit California, the authorities’ contingency plans amounted to “staying in emergency mode and praying for rain”, according to NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti. The specific contingency measures he suggested, ranging from restrictive groundwater use laws to immediate and mandatory water rationing, were far from popular—only 34% of Californians approved of the idea of water rationing, and that percentage would certainly not have been better anywhere else in the world.
There are crisis solutions that have been successfully applied in times of drought: Australia managed to halve commercial and residential water use during the 1997-2009 drought; in Israel, 40% of water used in agriculture comes from recycled wastewater, and 50% of drinking water is provided by desalinating seawater. The water crisis has also spawned creative solutions with public appeal: in Sacramento, a pilot project paid $1,000 to replace lawns with drought-tolerant plants, and Montecito County, which has managed to reduce water use by fining those who break local rules, is planning a project to buy water from rice farmers to discourage them from planting their fields.
But these efforts do not match the scale of the problem and, above all, do not fit into a new vision capable of solving problems that humanity has never faced before. It will solve them only by learning to find its way in the confusion of the present and by scrutinising the rumours of the future with lucidity. The past is no longer a reliable guide to the future, says Christine Colvin, analysing the case of Cape Town. According to Colvin, the authorities’ cardinal error was to rely on historical data that placed the city in the lowest risk zone for water shortages in South Africa. Climate projections, on the other hand, place the city at an alarming level of drought risk, and time has confirmed that they are more credible than relying on historical patterns.
A study led by NASA, Columbia University and Cornell University provides insight into how global warming will affect future water supplies. According to the study, the risk of a mega-drought lasting 35 years or more affecting the plains of the American Midwest and Southwest is more than 80% if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current levels. Past droughts, even the severe ones that struck the region in the 12th or 13th century, may seem like “quaint walks through the garden of Eden” compared to those of the future, writes Jason Smerdon, one of the study’s authors.
The battle to save the planet is not an easy one, experts warn—especially for a generation with a growing appetite for economic prosperity at the expense of environmental security. Nor is there a single, one-size-fits-all solution; rather, as the World Economic Forum report points out, the answer to water problems is a combination of vital measures.
In fact, the more you know about the environment, the more pessimistic you become, because you realise how long it takes to change the systems that cause the problem, says John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has studied climate change for most of his life.
Holdren offers a vivid image of the situation humanity finds itself in: it’s like driving through fog in a car with an ineffective brake as you head down a hill. “We know for sure now that the cliff is out there, we just don’t know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes.”[6]
Will we be able to maintain control of the car? Donella H. Meadows, an environmental expert, used to respond succinctly yet with dynamic urgency to the plethora of questions about whether the planet can stop its march toward self-destruction: “We have exactly enough time—starting now.”[7]
