As the world warms and many cities, from Madrid to Shanghai and even Istanbul, are in danger of drought, you may be thinking of a Mad Max-style future where water is a rare resource. And this fear of the future can lead to some interesting situations. For example, while ordinary Californians grapple with water shortages, we’re already starting to see a version of this, with movie stars using as much water as they want.
A study the researchers published in Nature Sustainability tries to answer exactly how the lifestyles of the rich and famous play a role in water scarcity. Their analysis found that “elite” sections of cities around the world use enormous amounts of water, and its effects can be as devastating as climate change or population growth on the urban water supply.
“In the long run, the unjust and unsustainable behavior of these elites will deplete common water resources, making droughts more severe and water crises more frequent,” Elisa Savelli, a research fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden and lead author of the study, told Earther. He wrote, “Socioeconomic inequality is driving today’s and tomorrow’s urban water crises, as well as any other factor.”
Celebrities like Kourtney Kardashian…
In California, where households have water budgets and fines for over budgets, the average observer can clearly see the wealthy running taps after celebrities like Kourtney Kardashian make headlines with their incredible water use. But Savelli said past academic research has mostly focused on average water use across populations and has not measured the impact of socioeconomic status on water use among different groups of people living in the same place. Savelli and his team began their work to more closely examine the impact of wealthy people’s water use on urban life.
They focused on Cape Town, South Africa as a framework for their models. South Africa has the largest wealth gap of any country in the world, and Cape Town faced a water crisis so severe in the mid-2010s that the city nearly ran out of water in a disaster known as day zero. While Cape Town may seem like a work in the extreme, more cities could look like Cape Town in the future as the income gap between countries widens and the planet continues to warm.
Car washes and gardens
The researchers modeled water consumption in different largely segregated populations of the city and examined how different social groups responded to drought. They found that while lower- and middle-income people used water more for basic needs such as drinking and hygiene, upper-class groups in Cape Town used large amounts of water for luxuries such as swimming pools, gardens and washing cars.
These excesses meant that although Cape Town’s elite made up only 12% of the population, the city used 52% of its water. Even when they don’t use public water, elites have greater access to private wells, risking depletion of valuable groundwater resources, according to the study.
The Day Zero event is often discussed in the context of the larger drought and precipitation deficit that preceded it. But the research says the worst effects of the crisis could have been avoided if every social group in the city used the same amount of water for their needs and limited its use to unnecessary things like pools and gardens. “Water crises like the Zero-Day drought in Cape Town are also a product of the unsustainable practices of elites caused by the city’s uneven power dynamics,” the study says.
The study points out that analyzes of the effects of climate change on water availability that ignore inequality run the risk of not fully addressing the issue: “The problem with depoliticized analyzes is that they often lead to technocratic solutions that are likely to maintain the same logic, and as a result re-create the disordered and unsustainable water patterns that contributed to the water crisis in the first place. it produces.”
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