As the world’s population continues to grow, access to clean and safe water has become increasingly scarce. But while some communities struggle to meet their basic water supply needs, the swimming pools of the rich and famous are guzzling up water resources at an alarming rate. In many water-scarce regions, private pools have become a status symbol, with affluent homeowners digging deep and draining aquifers to create their own personal oases. This trend raises serious concerns about the morality of the haves worsening the water crisis for the have-nots. In this article, we delve into the impact of rich people’s swimming pools on water scarcity and explore solutions to reduce the growing divide between those who have plenty of water and those who struggle to survive.
The global water crisis is a looming catastrophe that threatens our very existence. As the world gets hotter and droughts take hold in cities like Madrid and Shanghai, it sometimes appears that society is hurtling towards a dystopian future, akin to the world depicted in the Mad Max movies, where water is a scarce commodity.
The situation is already dire in California, where regular citizens have been asked to cut back their water usage to the bare minimum. Meanwhile, the rich and famous, such as movie stars, have been known to use as much water as they want. But how much of an impact do these excessive water consumption habits of the rich and famous have on the water crisis?
This very question was posed by researchers who published a study in Nature Sustainability in July 2021. They found that the way wealthy elites use water in cities throughout the world, could be as destructive to urban water supplies as climate change and population growth. The researchers discovered that the excessive water consumption habits of the rich contribute significantly to urban water crises both today and in the future.
The lead author of the study, Elisa Savelli, a research Fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden, noted that “In the long term, the unjust and unsustainable behaviour of these elite will deplete common water sources, making drought more severe and water crises more frequent… As much as any other factor, socioeconomic inequality drives the urban water crises of today, and tomorrow.”
The excessive water consumption habits of the likes of the Kardashian family that make headlines in California may lead one to believe that the wealthy are responsible for draining the taps dry throughout the world. However, Savelli pointed out that past research had mainly focused on the average water consumption across populations and not the impact of socioeconomic status on different groups of people living in the same place. This newly published study, therefore, set out to investigate the specifics of how the rich use water in urban areas.
The researchers chose Cape Town, South Africa, as a framework for their research, as the city faced a water crisis in the mid-2010s so severe that it was on the verge of running out of water. South Africa is the country with the largest wealth gap in the world, and Cape Town is an example of how other cities like it may be in the not-too-distant future, as global temperatures rise, droughts become more frequent, and income inequality continues to widen in the likes of the United States and the United Kingdom.
The research examined how people of differing socioeconomic backgrounds in Cape Town responded to drought. They discovered that lower and middle-income groups generally used water to fulfill basic needs like hygiene and drinking water, while the wealthy consumed vast amounts of water on luxury items such as swimming pools, gardens, and washing cars. The study showed that even though the elite constituted just 12% of the city’s population, they used 52% of its water. The wealthy also have access to private wells, which further depletes groundwater resources, particularly if water restrictions are enforced on a larger area.
The Day Zero water crisis in Cape Town is often talked about in the context of the widespread drought and rainfall deficit that preceded it. However, the study discovered that if everyone in the city had used the same water quantity for the essentials and limited their usage of luxuries like pools, gardens, driving cars, then the worst effects of the crisis would have been avoided. The study points out that any analysis of the impact of climate change on water supplies that does not take into account inequality is not all-encompassing.
Depoliticized analyses often lead to solutions that are more technocratic and effectively serve to reproduce the same unsustainable water patterns that contributed to such crises. The study authors suggest that more focus on how people consume resources and how this exacerbates the impacts of environmental degradation could be critical to preventing water crises in the future. The research highlights that we can no longer ignore societal inequality and its relationship with water crises. The time to act is now.
