The wealthy are driving water crises in cities across the world, new research shows.
They focused on Cape Town, South Africa, as a framework around which to build a model. South Africa has the largest wealth gap of any country in the world, and Cape Town faced a water crisis so dire in the mid-2010s that the city, a near-disaster known as Day Zero. While Cape Town may seem like a study in extremes, as the planet keeps warming and droughts keep increasing—and as income inequality rises in places like the U.S. and the UK—more cities could look like Cape Town in the future.
The researchers modeled water consumption across different populations of the vastly segregated city and examined how different social groups responded to droughts. They found that while people in the lower- and middle-income groups mostly used water to meet basic needs, like drinking and hygiene, the upper-class groups in Cape Town used vast amounts of water on luxuries like swimming pools, gardens, and washing cars.
“The problem with depoliticized analyses is that they often lead to technocratic solutions that are likely to perpetuate the same logic and, in turn, reproduce the uneven and unsustainable water patterns that have contributed to the water crisis in the first place,” the study authors wrote.
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