Less carping, more conserving of water
The temperature in Cape Town is rising rapidly, and it’s not due to the heat. Residents are boiling mad after being told this week that, from February 1, they will have a quota of 50 litres of water a day, and, when the taps run dry on Day Zero (likely to be April 21), they will need to queue to collect their rations.
The love affair many middle-class residents have had with the DA administration must be over. And, even with the iconic mountain and beautiful beaches, perhaps with the city itself.
If Joburgers feel like taking a leaf out Capetonians’ book and being smug about the poor management of the Mother City and the fact that residents are now calling for the national government to help alleviate the crisis, let’s not.
Now that the Cape Town water crisis has made international news, with the BBC saying this week it could be the first city in the world to run out of water, and mayor Patricia de Lille saying “we have reached the point of no return”, South Africans need to sit up and take note.
There will be many consequences.
Aside from lower water revenue for the city as some residents cut use, critical revenue from electricity sales will also drop if residents no longer use piped hot water.
Panic has truly set in, and it’s going to get ugly. Already, some residents are incensed about piped water supply for residents in informal settlements continuing — conveniently forgetting the constrained circumstances these residents face. For example, they do not have the means to buy bottled water or waterless hand sanitiser.
For other cities in South Africa, drier conditions are likely in the future. The Eastern Cape already faces rapidly dwindling water supplies. The UN predicted a global shortfall of water by 2030, a mere 12 years away. It said this week that “the upward trend in global temperatures marked by record-shattering warmth in 2015 and 2016 kept pace last year”.
Warmer weather means rapid evaporation of a limited resource — one that is in everincreasing demand.
Higher temperatures have resulted in cyclones, floods or droughts in some places. These have had the effect of slowing countries’ development.
And while 30% of the world’s available fresh water is in aquifers, accessing this water has had negative consequences. A 2016 National Geographic article says the aggressive pumping of ground water has affected ground levels, in some places destabilising roads and railways.
In some neighbourhoods in Beijing, the ground is giving way at a rate of 10cm a year, while parts of California’s Central Valley have dropped by 30cm and in some localised areas by as much as 8.5m.
Residents of Cape Town have lambasted the city for not doing enough, soon enough. But with cities’ funds already so stretched, how do you know when to invest and at what scope? What if the rains had come? We lambasted the national government and Eskom for not building sufficient generating capacity ahead of the 2008 power shortage. Now, with additional power supply that has cost billions, Eskom is struggling to sell it.
How do you allocate resources to avert a crisis when you don’t know when that crisis will hit, and when there are many other crises to deal with? While holding the government to account, we also need to take personal responsibility for carefully managing the water we have now.