People in Cape Town, South Africa, during a drought in January 2018.Refill your water bottle at a public fountain
To meet future demand, the disproportionate amount of water used by society’s richest people will need to be cut, researchers argue.
According to Elisa Savelli of Uppsala University, Sweden, the demand for water is increasing at an alarming rate around the world, especially in urban areas.
According to a United Nations report, 2.4 billion people living in cities worldwide could face water scarcity in 2050, up from 933 million in 2016. The growing problem is due to a variety of factors, including climate change and urban population growth.
Some countries are already experiencing severe water shortages. Cape Town, South Africa experienced a drought from 2015 to 2018 that lowered water levels in the city’s reservoirs to 12.3% of normal he. People have been told to limit their water use to avoid days when the city runs out of supplies, commonly referred to as “day zero.”
One of the little-studied issues is how water demand is affected by uneven use by different segments of society, says Savelli. To learn more, she and her colleagues modeled water use by different socioeconomic groups in Cape Town before and during drought. Groups are based on the city’s 2020 Census and are 1.4% of the population elite, 12.3% upper middle income, 24.8% lower middle income, 40.5% lower income, and 21% lower income. classified into informal resident.
Researchers then modeled the water use of the five groups based on information gathered about average household use through interviews and focus groups.
Prior to the drought, the elite and upper-middle income groups accounted for an estimated 51% of the city’s water use, despite making up only 13.7% of the population. In contrast, low-income and informal residents, who make up his 61.5% of the city’s population, were found to use only 27% of the city’s water.
Savelli says there are several reasons why Cape Town’s richest people use so much water. “A lot of people have pools that need a lot of water,” she says. “They also have fancy gardens that need to be irrigated regularly.”
A similar pattern is likely to occur in other hot cities with high levels of inequality, such as Barcelona, Spain, São Paulo, Brazil, and Chennai, India, Savelli said.
During the Cape Town drought, the team found that all socioeconomic groups reduced water use, but those with the lowest incomes were less likely to use water due to basic needs such as cooking compared to those with the highest incomes. found that they were more likely to have trouble accessing water for
Wealthy groups were more likely to have access to private sources of water, such as bottled water and private wells. Subterranean strata of rocks) could deplete, which could exacerbate future droughts, says Savelli.
The modeling also found that a 2°C increase in average Cape Town temperatures due to climate change could lead to even greater use of private wells by the wealthiest members of society.
Based on these results, Savelli says, policymakers can do more than just analyze water use across a city’s population. They should also avoid blanket watering rules that could disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, she says.
Unfortunately, there is probably no direct solution to uneven water use in cities. “To solve this problem to some extent, we need to criticize and challenge the political and economic systems that regulate our lives,” she says.
Savelli says over-consumption of water by high-income populations is unsustainable for the world’s water supply and needs to be reduced.
“For too long we’ve been thinking about water security in terms of water availability and infrastructure, but these analyzes are not credible and reliable,” says Sela Young of Northwestern University in Illinois. We’re focusing on finer-grained disparities in usage.”
“It is clear that we cannot rely solely on increased water supplies for a thirsty lifestyle,” she says. “Climate change, the collapse of infrastructure such as leaking sewers, and growing urban populations mean water security is becoming increasingly difficult.”
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