How Will Climate Change Affect Politics? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Water scarcity, and the potential for a catastrophe, spurred upheaval and anxiety. During that time, a local government pushed a water-conservation agenda more ambitious than just about anything the world had seen. Cape Town faced political fallout and experienced widespread protests. Divisions between the haves and the have-nots in one of the most unequal cities on Earth became the center of discourse. The racial wounds of a post-apartheid country opened once more.
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“The way the city has managed it is by forcing middle-class South Africans—dominantly white, but not exclusively—to massively cut back on their water use,” says Neil Armitage, a civil engineer who is a lead researcher within the institute. “They struggled for a while until they came up with this Day Zero concept, which was really a warning that if we carried on behaving like we were, then the water was going to run out. That had the desired effect of making people a lot more serious about water, but it also had a horrible political backlash as well.”
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Cape Town’s social and political problems during its water crisis boiled down to the same fundamental issues that underpin its past as an icon of apartheid: white versus black, and poor versus rich. During a 2014 investigation into water access, the South African Human Rights Commission outlined the problem in Cape Town. “Those areas which lack water and sanitation mirror apartheid spatial geography,” the commission’s findings read. That is to say that even the built water infrastructure is based on exclusion.
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