How Cape Town's Residents Are Surviving the Water Crisis—For Now | National Geographic

Cape Town is facing an unprecedented ecological crisis, never before in the history of the modern world, as a whole city of this kind is threatened to run out of water for its citizens completely. Cape Town residents have been told not to use more than 50 litres of water a day. That sounds like a lot. The water you use in your short morning shower is now literally all you have for the entire day.

In terms of daily bathroom routine, if it's yellow, let it mellow; and, well, here is also, if it's brown, it mellow. Exactly. And for showering, the water goes into buckets and is used for something else. Hand washing is in any way out, and we're now in most bathrooms seeing hand sanitizers. Cape Town authorities are threatening to fine residents who exceed the daily usage allowable, up to 10,000 rand.

I spoke to a girl from Kenya, and she was saying to me, "I heard in your country you use fresh water for your toilets." And she started laughing. "Yeah, we do do that. That makes no sense at all." Last week, our water was cut off by 11 a.m., so we've been forced to go through the Newlands spring to get water. Last year, in 2017, we had a third year of below-normal rainfall; that was unprecedented.

It's hard to attribute specific events to climate change, but an increase in extreme events, like drought, is what we are expecting from climate change. A lot of the blame made by politicians is to the public, saying that they are wasteful of resources. It's a shame for a city to say so. What are crises? Because most of us, especially in the townships, forget a lot of people that must fetch water 15 days away from their houses.

I've been living in a day zero for many years and I need water at home desperately because my mom, actually, she's at the age where she wets herself. I must wash it, right? And then, how am I gonna survive? It's very much worrying because we also rely on the tourists coming in and all that. How can we provide them with good quality hospitality when we've got like 50 litres? So we can use definitely, but we don't use as much at the best of times.

We should be saving water, and we don't. The solutions that are at hand are kind of engineering solutions, like desalination plants, which haven't yet been built. There is sufficient underground water in this region to help resolve the problem. The restrictions are not really good to restrict the agricultural community, although that could happen in the future.

You probably will continue to consume South African wines, but the question will be, will the South African people be able to consume water out of taps? In this case, it is not just the poor who are suffering; it's also the rich who are suffering. We all have to change our behavior.

So maybe you could consider this a note from your future: what's happening in Cape Town now might soon happen to all of us in relation to water, to energy, to air. We need to start solving these problems. We need to manage our resources more rationally and collectively, because otherwise, it'll be day zero for these essential resources.