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There’s an expression in Afrikaans, n boer maak a plan, which roughly translates to “a farmer makes a plan.” According to Carey Buchanan, a lapsed Afrikaner now living in England, it’s a typically stoic South African sentiment about perseverance—and apparently, one that encapsulates how many Cape Town residents are feeling on the eve of Day Zero.

That’s the day when Cape Town, South Africa is predicted to become the first major city in the world to run out of water. It’s coming sooner than you’d think.

It’s a name that conjures all sorts of 28 Days Later connotations, but it’s more a reality than a dystopian fiction. Day Zero is expected to fall on May 11, 2018—having already moved up (and then pushed back again) from the originally-estimated April 21 date.

Cape Town isn’t alone. Mexico City, Tokyo, and Delhi top the list of the five most water-stressed cities, according to the Nature Conservancy’s first global survey of megacities’ water sources.

Los Angeles comes in ninth globally. Nationally? We’re No. 1.

So, does Cape Town portend Los Angeles’s fate in a few short years?

In a word, no. But as Kelly Sanders, environmental scientist and assistant professor of environmental and civil engineering at USC, says, “the devil’s in the details.” LA’s water portfolio, what scientists call the sources from where a city gets its water, is diverse and well-funded, but experts say the city can do more to accommodate for future climate change and population growth.

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Contrary to popular wisdom, LA is not a desert. Some may mourn the forever tainted words of Kim Gordon or Joan Didion, but this is good news. It means that it’s easier for LA to save water, because there’s more water falling in the surrounding mountains, more natural groundwater sources, and more chance that rainwater can be absorbed back into the water table when it does rain, in contrast to desert cities like Sana’a, the capital of Yemen.

In the case of Cape Town, which actually has a Mediterranean biome like LA, environmental scientist and co-author of the Nature Conservancy survey Julie Padowski says the water crisis there has to do in part with a boom in population and poor drought planning.

Los Angeles, in contrast, has a strong culture of reuse. The city captures and recharges an average of 200,000 acre-feet of water annually, in addition to the 40,000 to 60,000 acre-feet of water recharged in local basins each year.

If Los Angeles does have some naturally-occurring water sources, why are we so water-scarce?

We’re bad at holding onto the water we do have. Most of our water is lost either through poorly-maintained infrastructure or natural phenomena, such as evaporation. When we use approximately 12 million gallons of water annually, on average, every drop counts.

Take the LA River, for example. In the 1930s, as hard as it is to believe, the river was overflowing. After a series of devastating floods, the Army Corps of Engineers was called in to pave it. The Corps rebuilt and bored out certain sections, paved it all the way to the ocean, and the flooding stopped.

Ironically, the concrete that saved people’s homes from a watery destruction in the early 20th century is now contributing to the problem that puts LA so high on the global list of water-scarce cities today. About 80 percent of LA’s water now flows out to the Santa Monica Bay.

Another reason for our water-scarcity is, of course, climate change and drought. Los Angeles isn’t a desert, but it’s also not drought-impervious.

Climate change accounts for the significant drop in local rainfall and dwindling snowpack in the surrounding mountains over the past few years, and both those sources eventually become potable water.

As of last month, snowpack was one-fourth of normal levels across California, and while LA on average receives about 12 to 13 inches of rainfall a year, the last five years (excluding 2017) only saw an average of approximately 8 inches.

LA’s sheer size and density also seriously impact water supply.

According to the authors of the Nature Conservancy survey, the economic development that accompanies urbanization not only means that people use more water per-capita, for things like washing machines, dishwashers, and so on, but that they’re also more likely to be drawing the water to run their machines from municipal supplies, rather than from independent sources like wells.

All of these factors have led to the high level of water imports that LA relies on today.

More than 80 percent of LA’s water is imported, making it the largest cross-basin transferer of all the large cities in the world, pulling approximately 8,895 million liters of water from the Colorado River Basin every day.

Despite our reliance on importation, “the city of Los Angeles is pursuing one of the most progressive models for local water management for any other large city,” Sanders says.

When she’s not teaching or leading research at USC, Sanders serves on the advisory board of OneWater, one of LA’s major initiatives to address—and engineer—water sustainability in the future. The name gives away its major innovation: the idea that all urban water should be managed together, as one.

“Traditionally, [different types of water sources] were managed in silos,” Sanders says. “LA is working to change the paradigm of water management by managing them together.”

As important as sustainable management of water is at the civic level, an informed culture of how individuals, from contractors to children, treat water is vital.

Developers are using new technology to conserve water, from installing efficient sprinklers and drought-tolerant landscaping, to expanding the use of water meters and upgrading an estimated 10 million toilets that were installed in houses and offices before the 1990s.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti knows that importing water is not a sustainable solution.

In January, city officials began restoring the polluted San Fernando Valley aquifer, just one part of the mayor’s plan to step up treatment and recycling of wastewater to reduce imports of water by 50 percent by 2035.

“Water is our most precious resource, and creating a more resilient, self-reliant Los Angeles means increasing the amount of water we source locally,” Garcetti told Environmental Protection. “The decontamination of this historic groundwater basin is a critical step in achieving our goal to reduce our dependence on imported water.”

The solutions to LA’s water scarcity are varied but complementary, which as Padowski points out, is its strength—the repairs and decontamination of existing infrastructure alongside more creative, or expensive techniques.

“LA has developed all these different ways of getting water,” she says. When LA experiences such stresses as drought or failing infrastructure, the diversity of water sources “makes the system much more resilient, because it gives you a much better chance of having water available at any given time.”

But how LA went about collecting our water in the past (i.e., expensive cross-basin transfers), isn’t sustainable or cost-effective.

This is where “shade balls” come into the picture. In 2008 and 2015, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dumped millions of four-inch balls into Silver Lake’s Ivanhoe Reservoir and Sylmar’s Los Angeles Reservoir. Shade balls shield the water supply from birds and stop algae blooms, and they prevent a significant amount of evaporation, saving an estimated 1 billion gallons of water a year.

Another somewhat surprising solution is the revitalization of the LA River, which prioritizes water conservation through stormwater management.

Where you can’t recycle or conserve, there’s the option to actually produce water, which is why many cities are turning to desalination. But it’s not the silver bullet it’s made out to be.

More than 80 percent of LA’s water is imported, making it the largest cross-basin transferer of all the large cities in the world.

Desalination requires a massive amount of energy. A typical desalination plant typically spends an estimated 55 percent of its total operation and maintenance costs solely on energy costs. Where it takes traditional drinking water treatment plants under 1 kilowatt-hour (1,000 watts per hour) to make approximately 250 gallons of water, it takes desalination plants three to 10 times as much.

When the average Californian’s water footprint is 1,500 gallons of water per day, the high cost of desalination quickly makes it untenable as a large-scale solution to LA’s water scarcity.

Companies like Elemental Water Makers are working to change that. The Netherlands-based company offers a system of reverse osmosis (one of the types of desalination) completely fueled using renewable energy sources. Relying on wind and solar power, Elemental’s model promises to provide potable fresh water at a fraction of the cost of traditional desalination by eliminating the need for expensive fossil fuels. [a lot of water people don't really think these are a real solution at scale but ok to include]

In the driest inhabitable continent on Earth, desalination plants are credited for saving Australia from total disaster after an almost decade-long drought. The country is home to 30 desalination plants, which accounts for approximately 1 percent of the world’s total. Many of them, particularly in remote areas, do use sustainable energy sources such as wind or wave farms.

Israel, in contrast, has focused its efforts on sustainable drip irrigation and water recycling, rather than on building costly desalination plants. The city recycles a stunning 86 percent percent of its water supplies. To put that in perspective, Spain—the runner-up water-recycler—only recycles 17 percent.

The U.S.? It recycles less than 1 percent of water. That amounts to 1 trillion gallons of wasted water a year.

In LA, Garcetti has made water a major focus of his administration, initiating conservation awareness campaigns on the household scale, which are equally as important as plans to repair failing infrastructure, as evidenced by drought-plagued Israel. The country ran decades-long advertisements, featuring a solemn woman whose face dries and cracks as she urges Israelis to conserve water, and they worked. They do here, too.

By the end of last year, Angelenos had reduced water usage by the mayor’s goal of 20 percent.

But according to Heather Cooley, water program director of the Pacific Institute, a water conservation think tank located in Oakland, while LA has “done a lot to diversify, there’s more they can and should do.”

“We still have a lot of work to do... and a lot of that is changing public behavior. We still live as a culture where we really believe that the taps won’t run dry.”

It’s an unfortunate reality that while LA has drastically reduced its water demand—Cooley confirmed that despite the city’s population growth, water use is lower today than it was 30 years ago—it’s still necessary to prepare for long droughts, to better recycle water, and to continue to reduce use.

For Sanders, part of the work of preparing Californians for drought and conserving water falls on the people.

“We still have a lot of work to do,” she says, “and a lot of that is changing public behavior. We still live as a culture where we really believe that the taps won’t run dry.”

Beyond how we treat water in our own homes, and how we maintain and engineer the infrastructure in the built environment, diplomacy and politics are also a major part of a sustainable water program, because in the end, water is a human rights issue.

In the face of somewhat disorganized responses by the South African and local Cape Town government agencies, Helen Zille, Premier of Western Cape, has made it her mission to inform the public about the seriousness of Day Zero, and what they can do to stave it off. She urges people to bathe in what’s called a skottel, really a type of small dish. Twitter has taken to reminding her that many South Africans have been bathing that way forever.

It’s become somewhat of a meme online, but Twitter’s response to Zille also gets at a real problem at the heart of water scarcity across the world: The homeless and the poor have massively disproportionate access to usable water.

“There are many Cape Town residents in the poorer areas who are saying they’ve lived in Day Zero conditions all their lives,” says resident Suzanne Buchanan. “It is certainly giving us more privileged citizens pause for thought. Water is a great leveler.”

In this case, water is a leveler because suddenly it’s a scarce commodity for people, regardless of class.

In Los Angeles, water is also a leveler of sorts. The homeless population here is often forced to live alongside derelict river beds, surrounded by water that is totally undrinkable, with no way of bathing or using the toilet.

While providing access to municipal supplies for the homeless is complicated by community opposition and lagging funds, the city did install public toilets on Skid Row for the first time in 10 years last December.

The United Nations says water is a universal human right, but as it stands today, access to municipal water supplies is more of privilege. So much so that increasing access for the world’s poor to that supply is one of the Millennium Development Goals set out by the World Health Organization. It’s an issue of both economics and public health that affects one in 10 people.

Cape Town neither has the same history of urgency about water as LA, nor the resulting culture of re-use, which for them comes up as a disadvantage.

Management and availability of water is also connected to the income of the average city-dweller, Nature Conservancy’s survey found. Those cities that have, on average, higher-earning residents who can pay for water from farther-away sources, while those with lower-earning residents are often forced to rely on stressed surface and groundwater resources. This is one main reason that “the strategic management of these cities’ water sources is therefore important for the future of the global economy.”

That means that a rich city like Los Angeles is able to draw water from the Colorado River, over 200 miles away from the LA metro area, while poorer cities don’t have the luxury of importing, even from nearby basins.

The good news is that, because most surveys didn’t account for the densification of cities and the efficiency of urban water infrastructure, water-stress has been drastically overestimated in the past. The economic and political power concentrated in the world’s largest cities enables them to fight water-stress and improve access.

Still, the health of the global economy is at stake.

Or, put another way, “this $4.8 trillion in economic activity directly or indirectly depends on the supply of 167 billion liters of water per day to these cities. Finding ways to maintain this water supply over time is thus of considerable economic importance.”

The future of a city’s water sustainability is caught in the balance between how fast a city’s population grows, and how quickly it can generate the financial means to accommodate the water-needs for that growth. It doesn’t make it easier when faster-growing cities also have fewer financial resources. What cities like Cape Town are battling against is both geographical and financial limitation.

Cape Town’s crisis “has to do a lot in part with the fact that they just exploded population-wise in the last decade,” says Padowski. “While they had a robust system for the population size that they had 20 or 30 years ago, it just doesn’t work now, especially with climate change.”

According to the scientist, Cape Town neither has the same history of urgency about water as LA, nor the resulting culture of re-use, which for them comes up as a disadvantage.

“They’re coming up on those problems that LA tackled a while ago,” she says.

Cooley says Cape Town could have done more to prepare for drought, what is now an inevitable part of life in drier, more arid climates. While it does have projects under way to generate more water, “you typically do that before the drought so you’re able to boost the water supplies. Once you’re in a drought your options become a little more limited,” she says. “It’s a bit of a race against time.”

In the face of a water crisis of this magnitude, Cape Town residents are having to plan, and plan quickly—not only for how to drastically reduce water consumption in their homes, but also for how to navigate some 200 water access points (the places where municipal water will be available for collection after Day Zero hits) in a city of almost 4 million people. Already, people are saving buckets of graywater, the water you’d usually let wash down the drain: water for the dishes, water left over at the end of a shower, water left over after shaving.

Public toilets are festooned with encouragements to “let it mellow.” And those who can afford to are buying bottled water from a fledgling “black market,” while others insist they’ve lived in Day Zero conditions their whole lives.

“For enterprising gangs,” one British tourist told the Independent, “supplies of fresh drinking water is South Africa’s bitcoin.”

In many ways, Day Zero is an opportunity for Cape Town to learn from Los Angeles’s diverse portfolio, and for Los Angeles, and other major cities, to reconsider how they’re preparing for drought.

“Cape Town is really the canary in the coal mine for so many large cities across the world,” lamented Sanders, “especially those arid, dryer climates, to really reflect on how we view water and how we treat water as a resource, because even here in Los Angeles, we have a lot of progress to make in terms of per capita water use.”

Mahta Moghaddam, electrical engineer and director of multiple initiatives for water research at USC, says that while Los Angeles can, and should be, a global example of sustainability, the city’s not quite yet there.

“We need to put our heads together and focus on coming up with a toolbox of solutions that can adapt to our changing climate and its ensuing water problems. The solutions will not all be simple ones (it’s not writing an app to solve the problem),” she says, “but involve long-term investments in observation and monitoring systems, scientific prediction and adaptation tools, and coordinating the technological developments with policy making.”

For now, in Cape Town, families like Buchanan’s will have to settle for making plans to witness history. And in Los Angeles, researchers and families alike will have to work on ironing out the details for the future of our own changing city.