Rachel Carlson

And I'm Regina Barber.

Thank you so much for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

And I've been looking specifically into that first part, shortages.

Earlier this year, the United Nations declared the dawn of a new era, global water bankruptcy.

Kaveh Medani is the director of the UN University's Institute for Water, Environment, and Health.

And that clip is from a press conference in January.

But Kaveh's been thinking about water for way longer than that.

He grew up in Tehran with two parents who worked in the water industry.

Yeah, and he says he's been sounding the alarm about water in Tehran for years.

And the longer this goes on, the closer Tehran could get to something called Day Zero, when a city or a place runs out of water.

Yeah, Cape Town's a really big one.

And I want to go back even a little further to 2017.

Cape Town was experiencing a huge drought.

Some water restrictions were in place and people were starting to think about how to conserve water a little bit more.

We don't have to shower every day.

We shower every other day, every three days, make the shower shorter.

That's Erin Baker.

She's a freelance journalist who lived in Cape Town from 2014 to 2021.

Yeah, and she remembers it all super vividly.

Erin says in the midst of the drought, a lot of people were holding out hope, kind of like, well, the rains are going to come, the reservoirs will fill up.