Chapter 1: What is the significance of World Water Day?
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Hey, shortwavers. Regina Barber here with producer Rachel Carlson. Hi. Hey, Gina. Hey. So in honor of World Water Day, you and Burleigh, another producer here at Shortwave, are exploring the ways water touches our lives, from increasing water shortages around the world to how it's affecting agriculture and aquifers.
And I've been looking specifically into that first part, shortages.
For much of the world, normal is gone.
Earlier this year, the United Nations declared the dawn of a new era, global water bankruptcy.
Calling for a fundamental shift in how the global community understands our most vital resource, water.
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.
Which, of course, is now experiencing more intense water crises because of the war.
Yeah, and he says he's been sounding the alarm about water in Tehran for years.
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Chapter 2: What does 'Day Zero' mean in the context of water shortages?
She's a freelance journalist who lived in Cape Town from 2014 to 2021.
Wow, she was there when all of this was going down.
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. But they didn't. And the rains?
They kept not coming.
On February 1st, 2018, every resident in Cape Town was limited to a maximum of 50 liters, or about 13 gallons of water per person per day. How much is that? Like, what can you do with 13 gallons? Not a ton. So the EPA says the average person in the U.S. uses 82 gallons of water per day. So 13 gallons?
That's one 90-second shower. Two liters of drinking water. If you have a dog, you always have to count in your dog. That's one sink worth of hand-washed dishes or laundry. One or the other, not both. One cooked meal, two washings of your hands, two brushing of your teeth, and one flush of the toilet.
So Erin is doing the math. She's making all of these calculations and trying to figure out, like, how many times do I really need to flush the toilet? Even her daughter, who's seven or eight at the time, is aware of it, too.
Like, no, mommy, we can't. I can't shower. I can't take a bath today because of the water issues.
Wow. Yeah. So, like, even kids are taking personal responsibility.
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Chapter 3: How have cities like Cape Town and Mexico City faced water crises?
Cape Town city officials knew they were in big trouble when it came to water. So they'd started building temporary desalination plants as an emergency measure to have more fresh water for people to use for drinking. But what actually let the city avoid day zero... What happened was that it started to rain. Wow. Filippo called it a messianic rain. And I mentioned that to Erin and she agreed.
Oh, it felt so good. Yeah, it's totally, it was totally biblical. I mean, we were all, I mean, it's not like we were dancing in the streets. It was cold. But I mean, you do have this sense of relief.
Oh, but that's not something you can count on in the future. Right. Especially not with climate change. They were super lucky. And Erin says a few years later during COVID-19, All she could think about was how many times every single day people were washing their hands.
And I was thinking, if we had had the water crisis combined with COVID and the sanitary measures that you needed, that would have been a freaking disaster.
So you can kind of hear Gina, Erin's mindset around water has flipped since 2017. And that's the kind of thing Kaveh says needs to happen for all of us. Because people often assume water is abundant. Or maybe at worst, they say there's a crisis.
How can something be a crisis for almost 50 years? Maybe this is a wrong terminology for a chronic problem.
At this point, Kaveh says maybe we're past the point of crisis.
A crisis is a shock. It's a temporary deviation from a normal that you're used to. But if the crisis is there forever, if it becomes chronic, it's part of the system. That's an essential element of the system that you need to face.
Okay, so he's saying the situation isn't temporary. So we need to completely change our approach to water.
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