Welcome back to the first part of my final two blog posts! I’ve decided to look at the political factors and implications of climate change on water in Africa for these final posts, as it’s very clear that climate change is the next if not already the biggest threat to human life on earth. Today’s focus will be the inequities that have been highlighted by the possibility of a 'Day Zero' in Cape town back in 2018.
In the 2017-2018 period, the city of Cape Town in South Africa was in the midst of a severe year-long drought and an impending water crisis. The possibility of a ‘Day Zero’ where the 4 million residents of the city would be completely shut out from water supplies in their homes looked more and more probable. This ‘Day Zero’ was anticipated to take place on the 13th of May 2018, when all of the city’s dam levels would have reached a capacity of under 13.5% (Millington and Scheba, 2020).
Although this day was ultimately avoided largely due to the water restrictions and tariffs that were introduced, it exposed the other underlying crisis, the level of wealth and racial inequality seen in the city. In fact, some people have been living ‘Day Zero’ in informal settlements across the city for most of their lives. They are continuously suffering from cuts in water, leakages and no direct access to water into their homes, which so many other residents benefit from in the same city (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2021). 25% of Cape Town’s population lives in these informal settlements and have to rely on getting water from shared taps that amount to just 4.5% of the whole city’s water supply (Winsor, 2018). The gap in these inequalities has only widened since segregation during the apartheid era as the population of poor residents also increases (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2021). Time and time again it’s the poorer black South Africans that have suffered from inadequate services such as water scarcity and 'Day Zero' has only highlighted the clear class divide present in the country (Gastrow, 2018). For so long the rich, mostly white, population of the city use large amounts of water in their gardens and swimming pools simply because they know the water will constantly be flowing through their taps, whereas the poorer residents residing in informal settlements have to ration the very little water they collect from communal taps. When ‘Day Zero’ was looking like an imminent event, and water restrictions had to be introduced, it again stressed the very different lives people were leading within the same neighbourhood.
In the past, there have been measures brought about by local officials to address the issue of inequality and lack of adequate water supply for all. This was done through water meters in the 2000s that limited a household’s supply to 350 free litres a day, but this failed to consider the informal settlements that have several extended family members all living crowded under one roof and only worked for the ideal ‘suburban middle-class home’ (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2021). 350 litres are plenty for a family of 4 but not enough for when several members of an extended family also need to live off the same amount for their everyday needs.
It’s clear that the inequalities persisted long before ‘Day Zero’ was a threat to the city of Cape Town but the droughts and the prospect of the city completely running out of water in 2018 stressed the underlying problems present.
See you back again for my final post where I will discuss what ultimately led to the exacerbation of the water crisis in Cape Town and how we can avert this in the future for not only African cities but every dry-land city across the world.
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