Study: Inequity Surfaces During Water Crises

A study of water use in Cape Town, South Africa found that “ the richest people used 50 times more water than the poorest,” driving the city’s water crisis, which reached an extreme in 2018 with the Day Zero crisis. In Cape Town, the study’s authors concluded that 14 percent of the city’s population used 51 percent of water, writes Damian Carrington in The Guardian.

The researchers say other major world cities face a similar challenge. “In March, a report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water concluded that the world faces an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip supply by 40% by 2030.” 

The report predicts that the gap in access to water between the rich and the poor will continue to widen as water scarcity deepens. “The scientists said failing to account for social inequality in a water crisis often led to technocratic solutions that simply reproduced the uneven and unsustainable water use patterns that contributed to the water crisis in the first place.”