Why Is Cape Town Drying Up?

Cape Town, a city of four million people stuck in its third year of a historic drought, faces exceptional water scarcity.
And we are seeing the signs of climate change beginning to drive what little rainfall remains to unexpectedly low levels.
There’s a large reaction, which is panic and anxiety about what the next months might hold, and for good reason.
Sometimes panic has a reaction that causes people to wake up and do things, but also it induces people to invest in things that maybe are not that necessary.
There is a lot going on that is helping to manage the water that we’ve got and to bring new schemes that are augmenting our water.
Although the focus is on Cape Town, there are others, like São Paulo, which from 2012 to 2016 went through a very similar drought.
Those five things are really important legacies to be addressed from the apartheid system.
The lesson is [to learn] how to manage our water differently by closing the loop of the water cycle that is running through the city.
To put it into perspective, almost two, sometimes three times as much water as we actually need falls on Cape Town over its catchment—not where the dams are but over the city itself.
So how do we begin to manage that water that falls on the city much more efficiently and treat the city itself as a catchment?

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