Rich people’s swimming pools and gardens fuel cities’ water crises, study says

The analysis, published in the journal Nature Sustainability on Monday, focused on the South African coastal city of Cape Town and found that the two wealthiest groups of residents were responsible for more than half of the city’s water consumption, despite representing less than 15 percent of the population.

“Urban water crises can be triggered by the unsustainable consumption patterns of privileged social groups,” the report said, adding that its findings were relevant to other cities with high inequality.

The report said that more than 80 metropolitan cities around the world had faced serious water shortages due to droughts and overconsumption in the past two decades, including Miami, Mexico City, Sydney, London and Beijing.

“Socio-economic inequality drives urban water crises of today and tomorrow,” Elisa Savelli, the lead author of the study and a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in an interview. “We need to rethink disaster as a social-environmental issue” and build policies that address inequality and “the injustices, imbalances of consumption,” she added.

Instead of analyzing average water consumption across the city, the peer-reviewed study modeled water consumption based on interviews and focus groups, triangulated with information from media reports and quantitative data such as rainfall and daily water consumption.

The study divided the city’s residents into five groups based on income, and found that most of the elite group’s water usage, and a large proportion of the upper-middle income group’s usage, stemmed from nonessential activities, such as watering their gardens, filling their swimming pools and washing cars. In contrast, the water use among the rest of the population focused on basic requirements, such as drinking and hygiene.

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In times of drought, the wealthier groups also used “private” water sources to supplement their public water supply, the study said — but by digging boreholes to access groundwater, they threatened the long-term water resources for the entire city.

In 2018, Cape Town came dangerously close to reaching “day zero,” when the city’s taps would run dry following a long-running drought. While that danger was eventually averted, the threat of “day zero” cast a shadow over another South African city, Gqeberha, last year, as its dams began to fail because of low water levels.

While local authorities took steps to reduce water consumption in Cape Town to avert “day zero,” the measures most affected lower-income groups, who were forced to cut their usage to levels that could leave them unable to meet their basic needs for bathing, laundry and cooking, the study said.

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The privileged groups did cut their use of water the most overall — but this was because they reduced water-intensive activities such as filling their swimming pools. Even with this reduction, their use of water still massively overshadowed that of other groups.

If all of Cape Town’s residents had used a more equal amount of water, the city “could have averted some of the worst effects of Day Zero,” the paper found.

The researchers’ model also showed that climate change — and its impact on drought conditions and local restrictions on water use — could lead to a significant increase in the wealthiest groups’ use of private boreholes, “thereby substantially depleting the groundwater resources available within the area.”

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Many previous studies in the natural sciences, Savelli said, had not taken the role o politics or inequalities into consideration when dealing with issues of drought or water security. “We have to always consider politics, because it influences the way the water is managed, the way we humans relate with water, use and eventually establish policy,” she argued.

“We need to revise our policies, avoid those reactive policies whereby they suggest increasing the water tank of the city, to drill additional boreholes, to increase [water] tariffs because they don’t tackle the root cause of the crises,” she continued, noting that inequality in water consumption was a driving factor.

Last month, the United Nations warned of the risk of a “global crisis” in water supply due to the reduced availability and increased demand for water, noting that the number of people in urban areas facing water scarcity is expected to double from 2016 to 2050 — potentially affecting between 1.7 and 2.4 billion people.