Confirmed: World’s First Major City Will Run Out Of Water In The Next Three Months

It is official: the South African city of Cape Town will completely run out of usable tap water in less than 90 days.

The country’s government has officially called April 29 as ‘Day Zero’, meaning all taps, except for emergency services like hospitals, will be turned off as there will be no water to distribute to four million residents.

For the last three years, parts of southern and eastern Africa have been hit by a devastating drought due to climate change. The intensity of the drought has caused unprecedented evaporation of water bodies, adversely impacting clean water. This has led to crop failure, socioeconomic problems like unemployment, food and water crisis.

Cape Town has capped household water usage at 87 liters per person, per day. This means keeping showers within two minutes, refraining from flushing the toilet, no washing the cars or watering the gardens, and limiting dishwasher use.

Anthony Turton, a professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State, told The New York Times: “It’s not an impending crisis—we’re deep, deep, deep in crisis.”

However, the crisis in Cape Town did not come as a surprise. In its World Water Development Report 2015, the United Nations warned the world will have only 60% of the water it needs in 2030 saying:

“Unsustainable development pathways and governance failures have affected the quality and availability of water resources, compromising their capacity to generate social and economic benefits. Economic growth itself is not a guarantee for wider social progress.”

However, it is ironic how the United Nations has realized economic growth doesn’t guarantee wider social progress if all it has done since its formation in 1945 is to promote economic growth.

The illusion and euphoria about economic growth has put planet Earth on a dangerous trajectory. To grow the economy, pressure must be exerted on the environment, which in turn leaves devastating ecological footprints on humanity.

In 1971, Romanian-American economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in which he argued that the rate at which the Earth’s resources were being exploited for economic growth, it is going to cause scarcity of resources leading to a future collapse of the world’s economy.

In 1972, the Club of Rome, with the report 'The Limits to Growth', shocked everyone by explicitly warning the world will run out of non-renewable resources by 2072 due to exponential economic and population growth.

Despite the warnings, no concrete actions were taken. Over the years, sustainable development has failed woefully to combat the environmental damage. The fate of humanity is now uncertain, particularly with climate skeptics like Donald Trump occupying the top office of the world’s most influential nation.

Not long ago, professor Stephen Hawking said he was convinced humans have just 100 years to survive. He has since warned humans to leave Earth saying: “With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious”.