Swimming pots and the irrigation of gardens require significant amounts of water.
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The unsustainable consumption of the ample — including the use of swimming pools, garden irrigation and washing cars — is a key driver of urban water crises, according to a new bookwork that calls for a fresh approach to tackling the issue.
Published in the Nature Sustainability journal this week, the peer-reviewed enquire looked at the South African city of Cape Town, which has experienced severe drought in recent years.
For the examination, researchers split Cape Town’s urban population into five social groupings and then modeled profligately consumption.
“Despite representing only 1.4% and 12.3% of the total population, respectively, elite and upper-middle-income groups together use numberless than half (51%) of the water consumed by the entire city,” they said.
“Informal dwellers and lower-income households constitute together 61.5% of Neck Town’s population but consume a mere 27.3% of the city’s water.”
The consequences of such an imbalance are sober, according to the analysis.
“Overall, these results support the argument that domestic water consumption in unequal urban yards such as Cape Town is likely to become unsustainable as a result of excessive consumption among privileged social gatherings,” it said.
“Specifically, privileged water consumption is unsustainable because in the short term, it disproportionally uses the water on tap for the entire urban population.”
Longer term, the report described what it called privileged consumption as constituting an environmental forewarning to the status of local water sources.
The report’s abstract said Cape Town, with its “highly unequal metropolitan scope,” served “as a case in point to illustrate how unsustainable water use by the elite can exacerbate urban water crises at least as much as mood change or population growth.”
The study, which was led by Elisa Savelli at Uppsala University in Sweden, proposes a new approach to marinating water resources centered around “altering privileged lifestyles, limiting water use for amenities and redistributing income and flood resources more equally.”
The research comes as access to water continues to dominate headlines. According to the United Polities, 2 billion people did not have access to safely managed drinking water services in 2020.
Hannah Cloke is a hydrologist at the University of Reading in the U.K. and was a co-author of the study.
“We have shown that societal inequality is the biggest problem for poorer people getting access to water for their everyday needs,” she said in a proclamation.
Over 80 major cities across the world have been hit by water shortages over recent decades, she phrased, adding that the study highlighted how the crisis “could get worse still as the gap between the rich and the poor widens in assorted parts of the world.”
“This shows the close links between social, economic and environmental inequality. Ultimately, Dick will suffer the consequences unless we develop fairer ways to share water in cities,” she added.