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By Reuters 
5h ago
By Kim Harrisberg / Thomson Reuters Foundation
Johannesburg – Cape Town faces an 80% greater chance of another ‘Day Zero’ drought by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates, research showed Monday, as the South African city rushes to safeguard the water supply.
Following a 2018 drought in South Africa that nearly caused Cape Town’s taps to run dry, known as Zero Day, officials have been working to prevent new water crises that could put lives at risk and destroy livelihoods in the next years.
Using new high-resolution simulations, researchers from Stanford University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated the role that climate change could play in future droughts around the world.
“At worst, events like the ‘Day Zero’ drought can become about 100 times more likely than in the world in the early 20th century,” said lead author Salvatore Pascale, a research scientist at the School of Earth. Stanford. Energy and environmental sciences.
Around the world, stronger El Niño weather patterns and climate change are causing harsher and more frequent droughts, and the already dry southern Africa has been particularly hard hit.
Cape Town’s first “Zero Day” was only averted by the city making an aggressive effort to conserve water, and officials hope similar efforts can lessen the impact of future droughts in the country’s second-largest city.
Knowing the risk of a repeat drought, the city is increasing its use of groundwater, building a desalination plant, cleaning up invasive water-starved plants and working towards a water reuse scheme, said a statement from city authorities. .
“The strategy has already committed to delivering more than 300 million liters of additional supply per day for 10 years,” Councilor Xanthea Limberg, a member of the city’s mayoral committee for water and waste, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. .
The Stanford study said that parts of the world with a climate similar to that of South Africa, such as California, southern Australia, southern Europe and parts of South America could face their own Zero-Day droughts in the coming years.
Climate modeling systems used in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that a drought as severe as Day Zero could occur two or three times in a decade in southwestern South Africa.
The study also showed that the 2018 drought was five to six times more likely due to man-made climate change.
“I am sure that many Cape Town residents have forgotten what happened now that the lakes and water supplies are back to normal,” Pascale said.
“But now is the time to rethink the old way of managing water for a future where less water will be available.”
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