Avoiding Day Zero in Cape Town

We're the first global city to have come this close to running out of water, and we're not alone in facing this kind of climate change challenge going forward. In a in a city like Cape Town, they are very sensitive to climate changes because they almost rely totally on surface water and not groundwater. So during the twenty eighteen period, this picture really illustrates the amount of water that wasn't left in the dam. So during that time, it it did affect the population at large. The city identified something like thirty points where you could come and collect water fifty liters a day, which would be a very tedious thing, especially for the elderly, the sick, the young. So who would collect your water on your behalf? And of course, it would be time consuming. In South Africa, the private landowner more or less owns his groundwater and can make a borehole without a permission. Actually, around Cape Town, there are around ten thousand private boreholes. Something like sixty percent of the water is used for gardens, swimming pools, lovely lawns where the middle class don't really worry about the resources. When the water restrictions were being enforced, they're mostly enforced here, which is, I think, quite unfair when there are golf courses that are are lush green. Only four and a half percent of the water consumption in Cape Town was from the informal settlements and townships. Especially in Cape Town, there are concerns about the skewed distribution of everything, but certainly also water. So that typically the rich use much more water than the poor. And it was only when Day Zero was announced that people, particularly in the middle class, began to realize their role and their very important role in delaying day zero. What we basically do here, because the hose here usually, of course, go back in the wall and out in the sewage and so on, but we decided like many other Capetonians to make sure that we reuse the water. What we've done in the, like say in the bathroom, when you wash your hands, we keep it like this and flush away. If we're not washing our hair, we can actually use the water to water the garden or if we washed our hair, we use it to flush the toilet. Since I was a child, I learned how to preserve water out of necessity, and I think a lot of people, lot of restaurants in the city, a lot of, hotels didn't change their ways, and that's because the taps didn't run dry. And I think the people that are really feeling it are the people in the rural areas and villages where they they can see the magnitude of the problem because the land is dry. The majority of the country is still dry. They didn't have the rain yet. There was about three foot of water still in the dam when we first got here and it used to overflow. We all fight to survive. We let go of staff so that we can survive, but then we put them in a situation that they can't survive. What are they gonna support their families with? Nobody else is gonna hire them because everybody's cutting. Prime becomes a problem. They're gonna go to my neighbor. They know what's at my neighbor. And they're gonna rob my neighbor. They took sixteen of our sheep and slaughtered it on the side of the road. When he went to go look for the sheep, all he found was carcasses. They cut off enough meat for themselves. They're enough to carry to survive. At the end of the day, it's all about water. Unfortunately, I think people lapse back into their old ways quite quickly. Now you look at the pressure in your taps, it's so strong. And you think like even though there's still like a water crisis but nobody's speaking about it anymore. Unfortunately, I don't actually look after those habits as much as I should but I think that's the idea of having the abundance of water. I'm assessing certain people like not take it as serious as others when it comes to flushing toilets, having two minute showers, and just really like cutting things down. I know I know that many Kaptonians are being lulled back into that comfort zone of imagining the dam levels creeping up and thinking that our water troubles are over. They are not over. This remains a water scarce city. To avoid new water crisis in the future, they have to implement more groundwater. They could also introduce a technical solution called managed aquifer recharge, where you collect rain and surface water in the wet periods when it rains and there's plenty of it and infiltrate it to the groundwater. Then you actually increase your groundwater resource which you can use in dry periods. The question is how water is being perceived. And the answer is it can be perceived in very different ways. As a right, as a resource, as a commodity, and as a gift that you receive and you should be responsible for the way in which you give it back to other forms of life. Obviously, people's never been in that situation where, oh, there's no water. Okay. Now we gotta make a plan. We're gonna be stuck without water. It's it's changing. It's life changing. I would want to be a farmer when I grow up, and I would like to take over this farm if we still have to farm.