Cape Town, South Africa, could become the world's first major city
to run out of water.
No city in the world has had to deal with such a situation
as the taps running dry.
This will be the disaster above all disasters.
If what we’ve seen is the first signs of long-term climate change,
then we’re in it.
And this is the warning, and this is the wake-up call for us.
It’s 4 o’clock, good afternoon.
And some good news in this water crisis,
Capetonians today managed to bring public water consumption down to its lowest level yet,
and we are now are using 505 million litres of water a day.
The city is, however, still aiming to reach that 450 million litre daily maximum target.
Mzikaze is getting ready for work as usual in Khayelitsha,
the largest township on the outskirts of Cape Town.
But for her employers,
a family living in Cape Town's Table View neighbourhood,
life has dramatically changed over the last few months.
Do the dishes today and wash clothes,
and then get Tarryn's room ready.
OK.
Water restrictions imposed by the city authorities
have forced families like the Porters to rethink their relationship with water.
So we stand in the shower in that basin there, and all the water goes in there.
First of all, we wet ourselves, meanwhile we switch off the shower all the time, right?
So you soak yourself and switch off the shower, OK?
Two-minute shower.
And then we take that water, that grey water,
and it gets used for the toilet.
That’s why I’ve taken the top of the toilet off.
And we flush like that.
And then we don’t flush the toilet all the time.
If it’s yellow, we let it mellow,
that’s what we’ve been saying,
if it’s brown we flush it down.
Because of the germs and stuff.
People across Cape Town have been rationed to 50 litres per person, per day.
OK, so we had to take all the grass out, this is plastic grass,
which has become very common in the neighbourhood and everywhere.
Plants that require water is just a no no.
And we catch water and we store it in any bins that we get.
And we just buy this at the local hardware store,
we connect it to the dam pipes and the water drains up to the swimming pool.
It seldom rains, but it rained the other day
and you can see the pool is filled up, you know, which is great.
I shower like every single morning, and then I’m fine.
Then if I feel a bit… then I use the wet wipes.
At the beginning it was very difficult, as you can imagine.
I cut my hair off and everything to help with the shampoo.
I know, I had to, it’s ridiculous.
I think this water drought, in a way maybe it was a good thing,
to start us thinking about what we are doing to the earth,
and how it is impacting in our lives and the future.
Climate change has triggered an unprecedented drought
in South Africa’s Western Cape.
After three years, dam levels have dropped to just 20%.
And Capetonians have had to face up to the reality of becoming the first global city
to run out of water.
This city has entered a phase where it is anticipated the real possibility of Day Zero.
Premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, was set to meet
with the national disaster management team yesterday,
and she’s also reported to have written a letter
to President Jacob Zuma
asking him to declare the water situation a national disaster.
The projection is that Cape Town will run out of water some time early in April.
That means you have to save water as if your life depends on it.
Day Zero became the apocalyptic code name for the moment when water systems across the city
would be switched off.
After this moment, people would be forced to fetch their water
from distribution points.
People really reacted to that and when we look back on that occasion
from the 18th of January, where we'd come from,
we reduced the overall city’s water use virtually by 200 million litres per day.
Some of the measures set out to avoid Day Zero have been controversial.
In townships, authorities have cracked down on informal car washes.
The violation is, for the car washes not to use the municipal drinking water coming
from the taps.
As long as they don’t use the drinking water, then we don’t have a problem.
Can you see? This is what they are doing with the municipal water.
Here is the tap.
It’s part of the bylaw that we confiscate the hosepipe.
The wheelie bins, once it’s empty, they just fill it again with drinking water.
So we are going to confiscate the wheelie bins as well as the 20 litre buckets.
We’re going to another car wash, just around the corner.
Fines handed out to car washers can reach as much as £300,
the equivalent of more than a month’s salary.
We've been here on numerous occasions, we’ve issued so many fines before,
you come back two hours later and they are busy again,
because of the social economic circumstances they find themselves in,
because that is what they say,
‘We need to provide for our families, we need to put bread on our table,
my children need to go to school,
if I don’t do this, I am gonna break in somebody’s house.'
For us also, it is difficult because we know exactly what they are talking about.
In a country still plagued by inequality, the crisis has been more obvious in rich areas
than in poor.
In the mostly black townships, inhabitants have been dealing with water scarcity
for decades.
Despite a quarter of citizens living in these townships,
they use less than 4% of Cape Town’s water.
In this area, the water crisis has not affected them hugely,
and the city talked about Day Zero and people will be having collection points.
That’s not new.
So most people here have been collecting water from standpipes for years.
Usually the taps are normally running freeflow but now, since the drought and the crisis,
they reduced the pressure of the water.
So, sometimes it take a long time to fill up a bucket.
Water restrictions have forced wealthier people to adopt the practices
of poorer households.
In this upmarket neighbourhood, people have been fetching water at a natural spring.
I come here twice a week.
I can use this water for my washing and for my garden, dishes and things like that.
Our consumption, we don’t want that to go up,
consumption goes up, you pay more for water.
That’s why we're fetching water, you know, it’s free.
It doesn’t belong to anybody.
That’s free water that is running in the river.
Some experts are wondering whether the rising awareness of inequality in the city
might generate a move for greater social justice.
What we’re gonna need to do, is not to build the efficiencies,
but to make sure that the cost of water doesn’t become something we can’t afford.
Water will always need to be subsidised, we have a city which has high levels of inequality.
We need to make sure that our water is also the plans,
and the provisional water,
is driven by a poverty agenda, and you have to ensure that we build greater equity
into both the access and the cost of that water.
In March, authorities announced that Day Zero was averted this year, thanks to the citizens' efforts.
Cape Town has been investing in several desalination plants
and will be tapping into an aquifer.
But it’s unclear whether this will be enough to stave off another crisis in 2019.
Some experts believe that for Cape Town’s dams to recover,
they would need about three years of at least average rainfall.
This is the wake-up call for us.
It will be drier, we’ll have drier intervals, we'll have events-driven rainfall from time to time.
But there’s no doubt in our mind
when we look a little bit ahead, there are some very, very clear warning signs
that this could be the reality and one that is being shifted by climate change.