South Africa

Since 2018, Cape Town, a city of 3.7 million people, has been experiencing an unprecedented drought. Cape Town’s water crisis was declared a national emergency when a decline in rainfall between 2015 and 2018 resulted in the worst droughts on record. The city announced a Day Zero – a point when the municipal water supply would be shut off. Thankfully, Day Zero never came, and the city’s largest water supplier, the Theewaterskloof Dam, was able to show an increase from 11 per cent of capacity on 9 March 2018, to 100 per cent on 2 October 2020 (Global Citizen, 9 October 2020).