The drought in Cape Town is getting so bad that its residents have been restricted to just 50 liters (13 gallons) of water per person per day.
What Cape Town needs now is relief in the form of rain—lots of it.
These solutions may help overcome immediate crisis, but in the process could exacerbate the problem by strengthening dependence on increasing water supplies.
When Cape Town is ready to make longer-term changes, one place it can look to for solutions is Melbourne, says Anne Van Loon, a hydrologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
Better still, even after the drought ended, Melburnians’ use of water has not bounced back.
Average daily consumption of water by a Melbourne resident ’01’02’03’04’05’06’07’08’09’10’11’12’13’14’15’16050100150200250300 liters050100150200250 Data: Water Outlook for Melbourne 2016 In 2010, Melbourne’s per-capita water consumption was 152 liters per day, and it’s only increased slightly since, to 166 liters per day in 2016.
This isn’t necessarily a case of an especially water-frivolous city cutting back; Cape Town’s pre-drought per-capita water usage was 225 liters per day in 2009 (pdf), similar to Melbourne’s numbers in the early 2000s.
That shows there’s definitely scope to reduce consumption in Cape Town.
Not all of these solutions will be applicable to Cape Town, which is much poorer than Melbourne, or to the next city that finds itself facing a water crisis.
“The Millennium Drought brought about profound changes in Australians’ conception of the environment, climate change, and water,” a 2014 study concluded.