Of all the subjects that interest me, and thus I write about, water is undoubtedly the most basic. Today I note a report on MSN.com concerning Cape Town, South Africa:
t’s the height of summer in Cape Town, and the southwesternmost region of South Africa is gripped by a catastrophic water shortage. Unless the city adopts widespread rationing, the government says, the taps “will be turned off” on April 22, 2018, because there will be no more water to deliver.
This would make Cape Town the first major city in the world to run out of water, according to Anthony Turton, a professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in South Africa, who spoke to the New York Times. “It’s not an impending crisis—we’re deep, deep, deep in crisis.” The shortage is the result of a multi-year drought.
The city is asking residents to restrict their water use to 87 liters per person per day. That’s roughly the equivalent of a four-minute shower using a regular shower head, or an eight-minute shower using a low-flow shower head.
Cape Town’s water system isn’t built to withstand a multi-year drought (nor are any city’s water system), which are expected to occur “perhaps as rarely as once in a millennium,” according to a group of professors from the University of Cape Town.
This particular drought won’t last forever. But according to climate models, it is likely part of a trend for the Western Cape of South Africa, where climate change is expected to bring lower chances of wet years and higher chances of dry years as the century progresses, according to Piotr Wolski, a hydrologist with the Climate Systems Analysis Group. Water rationing may soon become the norm for the city of 4 million.
I expect, if we haven’t already, we’ll soon see migrations out of Cape Town until it reaches a sustainable level of inhabitants. The rest? I don’t know, but if there’s not enough water, they either have to fight over it – or move.
The climate change debate has so far been a lot of denial, followed by a lot of finger pointing. But the result is all about the human carrying capacity of planet Earth. Will it go up, effectively making us less overpopulated? A few folks point out that the higher CO2 concentration must surely be better for plant growth. However, if those plants merely have more carbohydrates, then the argument fails from the human perspective.
But for most of us, I think without preventative action, current anchors of human existence – Miami, Tokyo, New York City – may start to shake in ways we’ve only seen when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were subjected to the atom bomb. Predictability, a key factor in human prosperity, will begin to disappear.
And that will surely lower the human carrying capacity of the planet.
