After several years of drought, the tourist capital of South Africa is poised to run out of water by late April.
*At the Voëlvlei Dam, water levels are critically low, sitting at less than 20 percent, reports CBS News’ Debora Patta. It’s one of Cape Town’s main sources of water – a source that it is on the brink of running completely dry within a matter of weeks.…
Cape Town’s four million residents are now only allowed 23 gallons of water per person per day. Next month that goes down to 13 gallons. Compare that to the average American who uses around 100 gallons daily.*
This is going to be very bad. The rest of the world really ought to be trying to help. But what can we do?
What can “we” do? Start paying attention to the overuse of non-replenishable water sources for industry and agriculture, and factor the stress on water resources into urban development and planning. This is a problem for Cape Town today (and Cairo, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo) but will be a problem in the next decade or so for major cities such as London, Beijing, Bangalore, and Los Angeles, and overuse of scarce clean water to produce food and goods is already a major stressor on nations like India, Pakistan, and Egypt where the cost of water overuse is not readily visible to the end purchaser. Nor are wealthy nations immune; the agriculture industry of Central California is going to have to come to terms with the fact that being “The Salad Bowl of the World” is going to require far better water management and irrigation control before it becomes the Dust Bowl of the American West.
As for Cape Town, they’re going to be rationing water for the foreseeable future, and even desalinization technology is only going to take the edge off of the problem. The nearly four million people occupying the the greater Cape Town metropolitan area are a test case for problems many cities are going to be coping with in coming decades.
Four posts? This is the entire discussion of the problem that is going to eclipse all other global problems in the very near future? This is going to touch all of us in ways we can’t even predict at this point, and no one is talking about it.
Actually, there is relatively little being done about it. It is one of those ‘tragedy of the commons’ issues that people generally assume will get taken care of somehow by changing a water policy or building a desalination plant when it becomes necessary. People have been voicing concerns about Cape Town’s impending water crisis for nearly two decades, and only now is it a surprise that the city is running out of water. Ditto for the cities listed above (and others) whose managers are vaguely aware that there is a problem but are politically savvy enough to realize that it will be something for the next administration to deal with, even though for the most part it can be managed before it becomes catastrophic. This does not speak well for dealing with problems of even larger magnitudes for which no amount of regulation or policy manipulation (e.g. global climate change) is really going to ameliorate.
Population of South Africa in 1960 was 17.4 million. Population in 2016 was 55.69 million. They’ve had decades to plan out their resources. They need to find the most economical mix of new water sources and tax accordingly.
This is the very example of what I alluded to above in which people believe there exists some inexhaustible source of fresh water if one can just change policy enough to access it. Cape Town is supplied by the Western Cape Water Supply System, which like the California State Water Project is trying to supply an ever-increasing population from an increasingly depleted resource. There are no “new water sources” to be had; Cape Town (and Los Angeles, and Mexico City, and Bangalore, et cetera) need to better manage the current sources they are using and impose prices that reflect the actual long-term resource cost of water usage in those areas. That people in Michigan and Ohio can afford well manicured green lawns does not mean that Arizona or Libya should use irreplaceable water to grow citrus or figs.
The one and true and only solution is something that most people aren’t willing to face: stop making so many people. Want to solve world resource shortages? Take a lesson from the trend in Japan.
Just pointing out that for 3 of those decades resource planning was dedicated to servicing just 10% of the population.
And plenty of arid cities and towns in South Arica are successfully managing their limited water resources. The biggest problem in Cape Town was delays and dithering in actually dealing with the issue.
It is now, and Cape Town residents are currently restricted to 50 liters. By comparison, residents in most developed nations use over 300 liters a day for normal use, which does not included the embedded water costs of goods and external services such as textiles, paper, steel, electricity production, et cetera. There is no amount of metering that is going to mitigate the fact that Cape Town is literally going to run out of fresh potable water.
Day Zero, the day the taps get switched off when dams reach 13.5% has been pushed back to June, due to stringent restrictions and the agricultural sector having used their water allocation for the season. The rainy season begins in May, at which time several measures, such as temporary desalination plants, are expected to be online. Day Zero may well be avoided.
Even so, some water restrictions are likely to remain, unless there is well above average rainfall.
I’m not sure I’d hold Japan up as a model for population reduction - you could argue they are underpopulated or overpopulated due to overly dense population. The Japanese government has been encouraging their population to have more kids, rather than look at re-structuring their society to embrace a lower, more sustainable population number.
Canada has a problem with overpopulation discussions, too - it’s very difficult to get Canadians to take overpopulation seriously when you can drive for eight hours here without seeing a human settlement.
Yeah, soon CA will be covered with solar panels and water desalinization plants producing water to fill everyone’s pool. I hear South Africa has a lot of sun and borders on an ocean or two also, wonder if it would work for them?
**The important thing to realise about the Cape Town water situation is that this is not a permanent or long-term problem. **
Cape Town normally has high rainfall and more than ample water, even for its increased population, but this is the worst drought for about 300 years.
Climate scientists say that there may be a tendency towards less rainfall in the Western Cape over the 21st century due to climate change, but there will still be plenty of wet years, and this kind of drought is NOT the ‘new normal’ for Cape Town.