DAY ZERO DOWN UNDER

What the Mother City is going through should be a warning to all major cities to prepare for similar doomsday scenarios.

“Cape Town is the canary in the mine,” says Dr Seona Candy, an expert in food and urban systems and a research fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Australia teetered on the brink during the millennium drought, which devastated the country during the first decade of the new century and left cities such as Melbourne a year away from running out of water.

At the height of the crisis, Melbourne built a desalination plant and a pipeline to divert water from the Goulburn River, north of the city. The plant alone cost a whopping R37 billion – but the projects now have the potential to supply more than half the city’s water.

This diversification of water sources is essential in countries with highly variable climates such as Australia and SA, according to Professor Andrew Western, who’s part of the hydrology and water resource group at the University of Melbourne (UM), .

“You need diversity of water supply to get security,” he told The Guardian in the UK recently.

“It’s worth spending money to have really good plans in place for when crisis situations are emerging. With Cape Town, this is probably where it’s fallen down.”

But waiting for the government to act isn’t going to help anyone – every household makes a difference, says Meenakshi Arora, a senior lecturer in environmental engineering at UM.