Living with water shortages
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Water scarcity is an increasing problem on every continent, according to the United Nations. I just want to grab it from them and turn the tap off. Please don't use so much water. It's estimated that around half of the world's population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. Climate change and population growth is expected to make the situation worse. It's not only about today's

amount of water that we're using. It's thinking about what comes ahead. This is The Food Chain from the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander and this week we're finding out what daily life is like when water is in short supply. My water today has been cut off since 8am and won't be back on until 8am tomorrow.

We'll find out how people adapt and what solutions are being explored. We say, let's go for it now. Let's bring the costs down. Let's build up the capacity to distribute this to more places in the world. We start in Pakistan, where our reporter, Barak Shabir, has been watching water tankers arrive to bring supplies to the residents of one of the world's mega cities. Good afternoon from Karachi, a seaside city of over 20 million people in Pakistan.

I'm standing by numerous huge water tankers at one of the seven water hydrants in the city. Around 40% of the city's population is facing adverse scarcity of water supply. The water crisis in Karachi has been going for a while, but has peaked in the last three years due to rising temperatures. There is at least a gap of 50% between the demand and supply of water, and this tanker service by the Water Board is trying to fill the vacuum.

A single tanker containing 1,000 gallons of water caters to a family of about four people. The government says they are providing it at a subsidised cost which is half of the actual price. An average of 200 to 300 tankers from this location supply water to the district east on a daily basis. The water shortages have been brought about in part by hot weather, poor infrastructure and theft. So how are people coping with this situation?

I've been talking to Gloria Shirazi, who lives in an apartment with her husband and young son. Surrounded, as she showed me over video link, with large water bottles filled with fresh water, or sweet water, as they call it there. You're welcome.

Do you see these? These two? The cans? Yeah? So these are the drinking waters that we have to get. We have three gallons. 19 liters of water. I use it for the cooking. And every 15 days, we have...

sweet water directly from the government sent to us. We transferred this water from the pipelines to our inbuilt tanks, water tanks. This over here is the balcony. Please do not mind the mess in there. Okay, you can see these tanks. Can you see this the size of the tank?

This has 40 litres of water. We have to utilise this for 15 days, this much water. And other than that, you can see these small gallons. There are a few buckets that I have filled with water. We just use that. And with a kid and my pet...

I require more than this. So me and my husband sat together and we said we might spend a little extra and we get some sweet water. So sweet water we get from tankers all around in Karachi. And that's quite expensive for us.

Have the water restrictions affected what kind of dishes you're preparing for your family? I love cooking. I'm a working woman as well, but I would love to cook something elaborate on the weekends. For my husband, my son, I invite people over, my mother, my father, my sister. But...

It's been a very, very long time since I've done that, just because of the shortage of water. I used to prepare rice dishes a lot. And, you know, in Pakistan, it has to be there in every dinner time or at lunch. And biryani is one of our favorite. In order to wash the rice...

I had to utilize a good amount of water, you know, wash it off so that there is a lot of dust and a lot of, you know, these small tiny insects in it. So I stopped doing that. Instead, I use macaronis and noodles and pasta, spaghetti instead of using rice. So vegetables, because of the weather here, it's very dusty, especially spinach. We need to wash it a lot.

Right? With water, maybe three times we need to rinse it. Instead, I found a way to get the frozen ones, which is already washed. We are short of budget because of that, those things, obviously. So you're having to buy foods that are more expensive? Yes. Because of this, we buy water, say around $20 to $30, something like that, per week,

And then I have to buy these extra vegetables which are already washed and packed so that I don't deprive my son of the vegetable nutrients that's required for a five-year-old.

And what are you cooking for dinner tonight? I am cooking very quick beef mince, which does not require a lot of washing. So it's pre-prepared, frozen, and I just took it out and I'm going to cook it in the pressure cooker very quickly. So it doesn't require a lot of water in it. Gloria Shirazi.

Seven years ago, another coastal city found itself in a similar situation. Surrounded by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Cape Town in South Africa was dependent on reservoirs for fresh water, and after three unusually dry years, supplies were running very low. The BBC World Service spoke to people as they queued up for spring water in December 2017, asking how they were managing with the increasing restrictions on water usage that were being put in place.

Sometimes when somebody's washing a bucket...

We keep that water so that we can flush with that water. We don't flush the toilet every time because that uses a lot of water. We came to, like the old times, washing in a wash basin to save water, not running the bath. Without water, we cannot go. At the time, the government warned that Cape Town was heading towards what it called Day Zero, when the city would have to turn off the taps.

By February 2018 we were down to 50 litres per person per day. There was no outdoor use allowed. We could not fill up swimming pools. We were told that we had to use reused water, grey water for things like flushing of toilets. This is Kirsty Carden, an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town and director of its Future Water Research Institute. I

I've been talking to her about what the city learned from the experience. Bringing it down to 50 litres per person per day for the average person who lives in a house with a garden was tough. Not being able to use any outdoor water at all for washing cars or irrigation was one thing. But at 50 litres per person per day, you cannot flush a toilet. A normal system of a toilet will take about 6 to 10 litres of water. So...

Toilet flushing was really restricted to absolute essentials. And when we did flush toilets, we were flushing it with the grey water that we had collected during extremely short showers, for example. How did it change what you did in the kitchen? I think it did change quite a lot because you thought carefully about things like washing vegetables and fruit in fresh water, what you could cook fresh.

with less water, so not great big pots of pasta, for example. If you were going to cook something like that, you would save the water for other uses.

and the ways in which we wash dishes, not in dishwashers, but in very small basins, very carefully rinsed, very, you know, very mindfully done, no leaving taps on. There was a two-minute shower song released, wasn't there, to encourage people to put it on and spend no more than two minutes in the shower? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, you know, there was a range of shower songs that came out and there were certainly hotels had them, you know, essentially piped through their sound systems. Like this one, commissioned by the Cape August newspaper.

Did the restrictions affect all households and neighbourhoods equally, rich and poor? The rich could certainly buy themselves some reprieve in terms of being able to afford a rainwater tank. There were many thousands of boreholes installed during the drought so that people could continue to do things like filling up their pools and watering their gardens.

But in all other respects, we were pretty much equal. Everyone got access to the same amount of water from the city. Informal settlement households were not restricted in any way. Their TAPs

continue to flow in the ways that they always flowed. For the middle-income or low-to-middle-income households, the amounts of water that were allocated were calculated based on a household size of four people. In many of the low-to-middle-income areas, household sizes can be eight or up. And for those households...

This meant that they were not even getting their 50 litres per person per day. So many of them queued at natural springs around the city. Many of them, bizarrely, would go to a neighbouring informal settlement and fill up their bucket from a tap. You wouldn't think that that would be an option for somebody living in a fully serviced house. And we had...

Things like water management devices. So flow restrictors or flow stoppers on your water meter that once you reach your daily allocated amount would cut off your water.

So for people living in those middle income, low to middle income areas, which was probably toughest for them, even though theoretically we were all receiving the same amount. In the end, day zero didn't arrive. And the government's been criticised, hasn't it, for needlessly scaring citizens. Do you think, with hindsight, do you think the public message was the right one?

I think it was a scare tactic. And I think the mayor at the time was probably extremely scared about what was going to happen to a city the size of Cape Town. The spectre of four and a half million people having to queue for water across the city is not one that any city mayor or city manager wants to even consider.

We were lucky that halfway through April, the first cold front arrived and we did get rainfall and it did add 1% in one week to our dams. So that pulled us out. But if that rainfall hadn't arrived or it hadn't arrived for another month, we would have been in an extremely difficult situation.

Since then, Kirsty says the city has invested more in stopping water leaks and has been exploring options for increasing supply from sources that aren't so dependent on rainfall, like groundwater extraction and purified sewage effluent.

Removing alien trees, which take up more water than native species, is also making a difference to supplies. And what about people's water usage? Are they more careful now? We've now had a number of years of well above average rainfall, so people's memories fade. However, I do think that people in general are more cognisant of...

of leaks, of wastage, of leaving taps running, of actually being sure that they're not misusing water than they would have been before. Could supplies get so low again?

Absolutely. We're in a very water insecure environment. The predictions for the Western Cape are that we are going to be hotter and drier. What advice would you have for other cities who are facing water shortages? They have to put in place some form of planning that takes into account greater uncertainty. We've got to anticipate changes.

and plan for greater variability in climate, but also in the ways in which people come into cities and the ways in which their lifestyles change and what water is needed for those lifestyle changes. So it's not only about today's amount of water that we're using, it's thinking about what comes ahead. Kirsty Carton, you're listening to The Food Chain from the BBC World Service.

World of Secrets is where untold stories are exposed. And in this new series, we investigate the dark side of the wellness industry, following the story of a woman who joined a yoga school only to uncover a world she never expected. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this. Where the hope of spiritual breakthroughs leaves people vulnerable to exploitation. You just get sucked in spiritually.

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I'm Ruth Alexander. This week, what it's like to live with water shortages. It's feared climate change and population growth will mean less water for more and more people.

For the 11 million who live in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, water rationing has become a part of their routine. In April, as reservoirs reached their lowest point in decades due to a lack of rainfall, officials divided the city into nine zones, which have their water supply turned off for 24 hours on rotation. Journalist Luke Taylor can give us an idea of what life there is now like.

So it's just after 8am here in Bogota, Colombia, and it's a Tuesday, which normally would be insignificant, but because of the way that water rationing is rolled out in Bogota, my water today has been cut off since 8am and won't be back on until 8am tomorrow. It's become alarmingly normal now. It's kind of...

Just an annoying part of life in the Colombian capital that one has to deal with. So, in my case, there are glasses of water dotted around the house. And if you go into the kitchen, inside the fridge, I have all sorts of random receptacles filled with water that I filled up the night before. And of course...

The kettle is filled to the brim. Obviously, how will I get through my day without a cup of tea? The impact of the water restrictions at home are one thing, but for businesses, it has a more complicated impact on restaurants and cafes because their use of water is far more varied and obviously a lot higher. I'm going to speak to some cafes and restaurants and find out what they're doing to adapt.

My name is Carlos Lemos. We are in Biscotela, where I am the owner. What happens when the water is cut off is that we have a tank in the building, but the capacity of that tank is very small, so we have to use less water. We also take measures when we run out of water. We close!

We don't provide toilet facilities. We use biodegradable disposable paper packaging so that we don't use normal plates, so that we don't dirty the plates, because we then run out of water. Fewer clients come and sometimes they feel that the experience obviously changes. But, for example, in this area, when the water goes out, the offices close, so that the sales decrease and the flow of people decreases by about 40%.

The Chapinero Alto neighborhood is full of trendy restaurants and bars, many of which are farm-to-table, like Minimal Restaurant, which serves dishes from all across Colombia, from the Pacific to the Caribbean, and up in the Andes, and works directly with indigenous communities. My name is Serena Gonzalez. I am a waitress and also a bartender.

And how affected have you been by the water restrictions in Bogotá? Really affected so much because in those days we have to close in the night because we don't have more water or we just take the reservation and that is all. So we have to sometimes close the bathrooms, sometimes we don't clean everything so well like we like, but we try. Like...

But it really was so hard. And have you changed the menu? Have you made any changes to the products that you serve? Like, in general, for the food, we don't change for the food. But for the drinks, yeah. We don't have, I don't know, cappuccino, espresso coffee. We just have American coffee. What about juices, cocktails? So we buy the whole...

I've travelled around 20 minutes from Minimal to Matrona, another restaurant in the city which serves traditional Colombian food. I'm here to speak to the head of service, Henry Melo,

We have to store water in big bottles to be able to sustain ourselves because the consumption of water to wash the crockery, the glassware and everything is very high.

And there are some products that we cannot offer because they are prepared in the day and need drinking water. Let's say soup. These are basically water-based, so no, we restrict them on rationing days. And that works because there is a lack of customers on those days and many offices are shut.

there is more or less a 30% decrease in customers. Henry Mello talking to Luke Taylor in Bogota.

With water scarcity a problem for a growing number of places, no wonder there are businesses popping up to try to solve the problem. Actually 97% of all of the water on Earth is in our seas and oceans. This is Alexei Levine, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Desolinator. So you can imagine how this prompted us to look at this vast resource that we have available to us in our seas and oceans.

The company extracts pure water from the sea and other salty sources underground, a process known as desalination. Now, that sounds simple, but actually salt is an incredibly problematic element, a mineral to extract from water. It requires huge amounts of energy. It's a soluble mineral, so it's...

And it's also very corrosive as well. You'll see, you know, if you've ever been by the beach and looked at cars or houses by the beach, they can become quite eroded because of salt in the air. So it's a very challenging, it's probably one of the most challenging types of water to process, but it is abundant.

Desalination is largely concentrated in Middle Eastern countries. If you think about the UAE, where I'm currently sitting, about 42% of drinking water comes from desalination. And in Kuwait and countries like Qatar, it's about 90%. Problem is, it's energy intensive and polluting. The salt that's extracted is often put back into the sea in a highly concentrated toxic brine that's harmful to marine life.

Scientists and businesses are trying to find more environmentally sound methods. Alexei says his operation gets around those problems using solar power. William, my co-founder, he'd had this very simple but very powerful insight. He was living in the United Arab Emirates and he was looking at traditional solar PV panels. And what happens is these panels get tremendously hot, as you can imagine when they're in an arid region like this.

And in fact, as the panels get hot, their efficiency dips. So it's a little known fact, but when the panels get to about 85 degrees centigrade, they very often will stop working. So the insight was really about looking at that heat that is captured in these panels, and we'd harvest that thermal energy. Hot water as a means of storing energy is incredibly low cost and very efficient.

They can use that energy to distill sea and brackish water 24 hours a day. Think of it like a giant kettle under pressure. And the water flashes and we harvest what is our product, which is ultra-pure water. Now we can take that ultra-pure water and we can, for example, make hydrogen with it, or we can remineralise it and make very high-quality drinking water.

The leftover salt is then repurposed. We take our waste brine, we recycle it through our system, we ultra-concentrate it so it becomes like a thick salty soup, and then we crystallise it. We make salt and nothing goes back into the environment. To date, Alexei's company has two plants in the United Arab Emirates. I asked him whether this is something that could be scaled up and made affordable for lower-income countries.

The sad irony, Ruth, is that in lower income countries, very often they pay much more of a premium for water. The challenge that we see for low income countries is not the ability to provide affordable water. It's actually gaining the support of organizations, whether it's, for example, the World Bank or Asian Development Bank.

to actually underwrite projects, because we can provide the technology and we can actually bring some of the financing to bear as well. But what we need to ensure is that the projects can be guaranteed in order to ensure their financial stability. And if you can process it in a way that's sustainable and circular, as we do in our case, we say, let's go for it now. Let's bring the costs down. Let's build up the capacity to distribute this to more places in the world.

Alexi Levine. Let's wash hands. A little water. What do you say? What do you say? Back in Gloria's small apartment in Karachi, it's time to wash hands before dinner. As with everything involving water, very carefully. Wash your fingers like this. Clean, partly and clean.

See, we have adapted to this lifestyle now. Even washing my hands, I have to think how much water to use. But this has become a norm for us right now. Do you think about water differently now? Do you value it?

Absolutely. On the way, when I drive to work, I see a few bungalows and I see their gardeners who are actually, you know, they're putting water in the greenery and they're just wasting it and they're either washing their cars and all and I just want to stop my car and I just want to grab it from them and turn the tap off. Please don't use so much water or just wait, let me fill the bucket that is in my car.

You know, that's how it is. Is this situation a factor you take into account when you look into the future? Is it something that's shaping your decisions about life? It certainly is. Me and my husband are both working, right? So there is this amount of income that we are having. Say a quarter of it goes just for this purpose.

So that's too much. For that reason, I can't think of renting a bigger apartment, renting a better place, so that I love plants, I love gardening, and I love having animals in my house. I want to, but I have given up that dream.

Just because we are short of what in the whole city, actually, we've honestly speaking, we have thought about moving from the city even. But, you know, the the situation of jobs and, you know, that has messed us up.

Gloria Shirazi. Thanks to her and to everyone we spoke to for this week's programme. You can share your experiences of living with water shortages by emailing thefoodchain at bbc.co.uk. And you may also like to listen to this week's Business Daily. Elizabeth Hotson will be looking at how old water infrastructure is being modernised to prevent pollution, leaks and theft. Search for Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

From me and the rest of the Food Chain team, Romela Dasgupta and Beatrice Pickup, thanks for listening and join us again next week. When you're young, it feels like anything is possible. Maybe you're a little hot-headed, but your optimism lifts you up and your righteous fury can be rocket fuel, propelling you to fight for what's right. You might make choices that put you in danger. You might even make history. I'm Nicola Coughlan. This is History's Youngest Heroes. Rebellion.

Risk and the radical power of youth. Being young, maybe she didn't think too much. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. 12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Including a young man called Nelson Mandela.

A firebrand who led the defiance campaign against apartheid. Break segregation laws, ignore curfews, enter the door for white people at the post office, stand on the white side of the platform at the train station. And it's decided that black people are going to do this en masse. And Lakshmi Bhai, the Rani of Jhansi.

India's warrior queen. She was a small woman, leading her troops astride a horse, sword in each hand, taking on the might of the entire British Empire. History is lit up by young people who act on instinct and stick to their principles. Like Julian of Norwich, one of the first women to write in the English language. A trailblazer, but

but at a cost. Why would somebody choose to have themselves blocked up into a tiny little cell with limited contact with the outside world, out of choice? And Lady Jane Grey, queen for nine days, who refused to give up her faith and chose to face the executioner's axe. You have someone who is...

knowingly risking death and then ultimately knowingly taking death because there is something that matters more to them than their life itself. And that's a fundamentally heroic position. These are tales of saints, athletes, Hollywood superstars and pioneers. Some heroes are household names. Some have been all but forgotten, like Vasili Arkhipov.

A Soviet naval officer whose extraordinary courage helped save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Well, sticking to your guns on that submarine in that heat, that take guts. That really takes guts. History made by young people. Follow History's Youngest Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

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