In June, experts at the Council on Foreign Relations debated the issue of “Countdown to Day Zero,” when a city or country could run out of clean drinking water, and the connection between water scarcity and security.
“And we’ve seen that with too little water as well,” he added.
And, again, we saw 230,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes.
Wilson said countries of all stripes have failed to prepare for the worst, citing the lead-contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and droughts in California.
He added that the Cape Town crisis shows that it’s usually the poor who are left behind, while the wealthy communities have an abundance of water.
Cheslow saw these inequities in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
“And it’s unclear if the institutional arrangements will hold in coming years.” “We can think about other trans-boundary situations that are quite familiar to us — like the Nile, where Ethiopia’s construction of the new dam is seen as a threat to Egypt, in particular.
Another solution to the water scarcity issue that all three experts touched on was desalinization.
She observed that when it rained, a small parking lot would often flood, and the local people there, with the assistance of the hospital, desalinized this water to make it drinkable.
But Wilson warned that desalinization is not a long-term solution, noting the sheer amount of energy needed for the process, which in turn is reliant on water.