The 4 million residents of Cape Town, South Africa, are about to experience climate change on a horrifying scale.
Three years of unforgiving drought in Cape Town, South Africa, have led to the once-unthinkable: A great world city is about to turn off the tap to its municipal water supply. The long-feared “Day Zero”—the point when the reservoirs serving Cape Town drop below the minimum levels needed to provide water safely—will arrive April 21
What is “Day Zero”? After all, it’s only two and a half months away.
“Day Zero is the day that the water resource system runs out of water,” said Mark New, the AXA Research Chair in African Climate Risk at the University of Cape Town, in an email. What does this mean? “No water coming out the taps. Toilets cannot be flushed. Fire services cannot get water out of the fire hydrants. People will have to walk to water tankers to fill up drinking water bottles.
World empires have risen and fallen on the availability of water. Access to water has driven mass migrations and led to wars. In other words, this is no joke.
And there’s a lesson here for the United States that we ought to take heed.
Cape Town has much in common with other areas that have what’s called a Mediterranean climate, including southern Europe and California.
Cape Town’s climate mirrors California’s, with some geographic differences of note that enable California to forestall the impacts being felt in South Africa. However, California is still faced with a similar potential cataclysm, as five years of drought, overwhelmed by a single year of record rainfall, are being felt again with one of the state’s driest winters on record to date.
We must take action now on climate change, before it is all of our undoing.