podcast
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Every Monday on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish explores the animating forces of American politics. It’s not about the horserace, it’s about the larger cultural ideas driving the American electorate. Audie draws on the deep well of CNN reporters, editors, and contributors to examine topics like the nuances of building electoral coalitions, and the role the media plays in modern elections. Every Thursday, Audie pulls listeners out of their digital echo chambers to hear from the people whose lives intersect with the news cycle, as well as deep conversations with people driving the headlines. From astrology’s modern renaissance to the free speech wars on campus, no topic is off the table.
Preparing for a Water Crisis
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Jun 6, 2024
Each of the last 12 months has become the hottest ever on record and the UN Secretary General has warned that countries must act on the climate crisis within the next year and a half. This week Audie talks to Bill Weir, CNN’s Chief Climate Correspondent, about how the climate crisis will affect water supply, and why we should all be thinking about what the future of sustainable water usage looks like. Then, Audie chats with two water experts: Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez, Head of Economic Growth and Environment at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, where they could run out of water this month. And Christine Colvin, Water Policy Lead at the World Wildlife Fund, she was in Cape Town during a water crisis that almost turned off the taps.
For more on Mexico City’s water crisis check out this story by Laura Paddison: https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/25/climate/mexico-city-water-crisis-climate-intl
Bill Weir’s book, “Life as We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World” is available now.
Episode Transcript
Audie Cornish
00:00:01
Water and politics. I didn't totally think there was a link. But I'm coming to understand that's not the case.
Bill Weir
00:00:10
The United Nations did a report and looked at 5000 years of human history, and the one event that will trigger political change more than any other is drought.
Audie Cornish
00:00:21
This is Bill Weir.
Bill Weir
00:00:22
My title?
Audie Cornish
00:00:23
Say your title again.
Bill Weir
00:00:24
Chief climate correspondent.
Audie Cornish
00:00:26
Bill has been helping me understand how water fits into the long list of international climate crises. For instance, the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a climate scientist, and she's talked about reforming water usage laws, especially in the country's powerful agriculture sector. Probably because she was mayor of Mexico City and they struggled with over pumped groundwater, periodic drought and aging water treatment plants, problems which have since escalated into crisis.
PBS headline
00:00:58
Mexico City, one of the world's most populous cities, could be just months away from running out of water.
CNN headline
00:01:03
The city of nearly 22 million people is struggling to cope after years of low rainfall. It's also dealing with the impact of chaotic urban growth.
CBS headline
00:01:12
It's being referred to as day zero, and experts warn it could happen in June. An ongoing drought and poor infrastructure in the region has fueled the crisis, and there are not a lot of solutions.
Audie Cornish
00:01:26
The problem is, it doesn't take much to tip a city or a country into a water crisis. But it does take a lot to get people on board to prevent one.
Bill Weir
00:01:39
'Mr. Rogers taught me the best tip for covering climate, which is when things get scary, look for the helpers. And there are so many helpers out there thinking about ways to re-invent everything in our lives in a more sustainable way.
Audie Cornish
00:01:53
'So we're going to hear from some of those people today. People who faced and are facing a so-called day zero. What happens when, after years of neglect, you look up and realize the taps might run dry, or at least slow to a trickle? How do you get people on board, especially the ones insulated by money or power or their own wells? How do you convince people that a slow moving and far less likely headlining disaster is still one worth preparing for? I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the assignment.
Bill Weir
00:02:32
Depending on where you live in this, in this world, in this country, you're cycling either between too much water all at once or never enough.
Audie Cornish
00:02:40
So Bill Weir recently published a book. It's called "Life as We Know It Can Be: Stories of eople, Climate, and Hope In a Changing World." I asked him to help me understand what makes a water crisis so different from other disasters.
Bill Weir
00:02:55
Well, I like to say that sudden disaster tends to bring people together. If you've been through a hurricane together or if your whole town burned down, or maybe there was an attack like 9/11, everybody's sort of cycling through the five stages of grief, of what was lost at the same time. And you can prop each other up and hashtag will rebuild. But it's the slow motion disasters that really test a community. And drought is the prime example of that. The United Nations did a report and looked at 5000 years of human history, and the one event that will trigger political change more than any other is drought. When you start looking across the property line and seeing your neighbors suddenly washing their car or, or unloading, their new swimming pool in the backyard, it's sort of tears of the fabric of trust within a community.
Audie Cornish
00:03:47
Is that because it exposes inequality? Because, I mean, we've talked about forever. I think, like just the idea that clean drinking water campaigns and who has water and who doesn't, but you saying this thing about. Water scarcity and political instability is actually kind of jarring to hear.
Bill Weir
00:04:07
Yeah, because at the bottom of our pyramid of needs, it's the most primal. It's the foundation. You know, we can figure out different ways to to meet our caloric needs for food. But water is the stuff of life, right? And if it is gone, the clock is ticking. You know, there's not much margin for error there. And so when we take it for granted in this country, most of this country, although in the in the American Southwest where you are forced to deal with it and desert communities, they've shown amazing innovation on how to deal with it, how to live with less. It's possible, but it takes a mindset shift that I think most Americans have never been forced into. We turn on a tap, water comes out. That is not the case in a lot of countries around the world. And rationing and how you structure, rationing programs really cuts to fairness and a sense of community. And then that's when we get into human nature, where that's really can be the scariest force of all.
Audie Cornish
00:05:08
To your point, water management seems to be a huge thing that will often drive these crises, right? It's not necessarily a drought or a flood. It's like, how do your pipes handle it?
Bill Weir
00:05:21
Totally. Now, Mexico City is a really a poster child of of all of the things that can go wrong. And it starts when the Spaniard showed up. At that time, the Aztecs had built this beautiful, flourishing city in a series of lakes. This is a mountaintop lakebed that we're talking about here. The conquistadors didn't like that. They came in with the with the mindset of taking dominion over nature. So they drained all those lakes, and they turned these canals into courtyards and started this mindset around water that just set them up for failure again and again and again. Floods, droughts built in because nature always bats last. Now our country much younger than than Mexico and so a lot of our more modern cities, even built in the 50s, will have to make adjustments. But not nearly anything as fundamental is what's happening there, where the entire city is sinking, it's all about geology and deep history and just so many strikes against them.
Audie Cornish
00:06:22
But at the same time, I, I because I was like, wait, are there places in the U.S. That are vulnerable this I kind of went looking around and doing a little research and it was interesting. A place like St. Louis, which has like an older water pipe system that still has lead like that's the kind of thing where if the water supply is damaged in some way, all of a sudden you have a crisis. I was reading about Buffalo, New York, basically between blizzards and flooding. Their water treatment plant is like vulnerable to damage. And that is something that could cause a water crisis. And then of course, we've seen, you know, Jackson, Mississippi, Flint, etc. there are places where all of it doesn't take much to tip you over into crisis. As it turns out, when it comes to water.
Bill Weir
00:07:12
Absolutely. And especially for the new planet that we live on. Right. So much of our infrastructure was built for a Goldilocks Earth that really doesn't exist anymore. And we're trying to figure out how this new planet really works. With the water cycles changing and all those sorts of things. So it is the least sexy thing. It is a thing we don't think about as much. But it matters.
Audie Cornish
00:07:33
Yeah you end up talking about, like wastewater treatment and wastewater cycling.
Bill Weir
00:07:38
Yes. And you have to get excited about the idea that greywater can be reused, you know, in ways that we haven't considered. When you consider that toilets constitute 30% of freshwater use in the cities. And so often we just use fresh water to flush that toilet. When you could use the used shower water, you know, it's gray water is is waste free treated water that can be used for irrigation, can be used for for bathing even safely. And more and more cities are being forced on how to deal with this. California cities are doing a lot with recycling, water. But then places like Tucson sort of lead the nation in rainwater harvesting. Vegas doubled their population and decrease their water use just by convincing folks to tear up their lawns and be just more sensible about water use. And we can live with a lot less. And an American way is there's so much waste built into our system here and the way we think about things, but just by thinking about it in a more precious way, there are solutions that are readily available that could avoid a lot of pain.
Audie Cornish
00:08:45
But you're used to to messaging, so to speak, like you're used to trying to get on air and without waving your arms around. I don't I don't consider you a big arm waver.
Bill Weir
00:08:54
Thank you.
Audie Cornish
00:08:54
You're trying to say, you know what I'm talking about.
Bill Weir
00:08:57
Yeah, it's of course, of course.
Audie Cornish
00:08:59
Hey, urgency. But also. Trying to weave in more optimism.
Bill Weir
00:09:07
Yes, trying to turn anxiety into action. Getting folks to to connect with their neighbors around nature, looking for the most sensible solutions. Even in places where you think you're in the clear and you don't have to worry about this today because chances are you might have to worry about it tomorrow. Knowledge is power. I think we need to measure our water use a lot more. I think we, whether it's water or whatever, is in our air or wildfire seasons, any of these big climactic, stories, we lack the capacity to imagine the worst, but also the best and and the solutions that are possible.
Audie Cornish
00:09:45
I'm aware that most of the water freshwater use on the Earth is used in agriculture. People are using water for hydropower like there. These big systemic things that go beyond like shorter showers.
Bill Weir
00:10:03
Not to mention the amount of water it takes to create AI when you ask ChatGPT a question. The power. Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:10:12
That's where it feels overwhelming. That's where it feels like, oh, there's something about my life where I live in this world that is fundamentally unsustainable in ways that I'm not even totally able to adjust for.
Bill Weir
00:10:25
Yeah, I think it starts with understanding the ecosystem around you. First of all, understanding what is my body of water? Where does my water come from? Even just basically understanding that is a first step towards, a better way. But you're absolutely right that when foreign nationals are buying American ranches purely for the water rights in order to grow feed for their horses in Saudi Arabia, or their cattle in China, for example, that's a huge problem. It is a political issue. In Arizona, the governor is trying to stop that when almond growers and big corporate almond growers are absolutely draining, the streams of California to the point where they canceled salmon fishing season again, because nature isn't getting the water it needs, and so much of it is going to farms and cities. That is a problem. That is a political issue. That should be a topic of presidential debate. 40 million people live off of the Colorado, river system and their cows and their lawns and their swimming pools, and that's not forever.
Audie Cornish
00:11:31
How did the Day Zero campaigns, or just these crises that are surfacing draw the attention of like leaders, right? Turn it into something that's like a big agenda item for a country.
Bill Weir
00:11:45
The thing about the climate crisis, it's almost as if it was invented by sort of a cabal of evil psychologists. Right? Because it's so slow motion that you can dismiss it in many ways.
Audie Cornish
00:12:00
And people do.
Bill Weir
00:12:01
And people do, and especially if you're just thinking in terms of 2 or 4 year election cycles when this story popped up in Mexico, you know, a lot of the parties in charge called it fake news because they know a really thirsty populace is one that's not going to vote for the incumbent. But if if that is what it takes to rally neighborhoods and get folks animated in a peaceful way, to agitate for change around infrastructure, if the framing is, is that we are now on the clock and there is a day zero, and it is within months or years from now that is much, I think, easier to organize around than some distant, nebulous threat that may or may not happen.
Audie Cornish
00:12:47
CNN senior climate correspondent, Bill Weir. In just a minute, what we can learn from Day Zero in Cape Town, South Africa and Mexico City. To better understand what happens when a major city is threatened with the possibility of Day Zero, the day the taps run out. I called up two experts. Christine Colvin is the policy lead for water with the World Wildlife Fund International.
Christine Colvin
00:13:18
I worked in South Africa for many years, and I was there during the big mega drought that threatened Cape Town's water security.
Audie Cornish
00:13:26
And this is Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez.
Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez
00:13:28
I am a faculty member at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico, and I am expert in climate change and impacts in water availability.
Audie Cornish
00:13:40
So I want to start just helping people understand the concept of a Day Zero. Where did this come from? What does it mean?
Christine Colvin
00:13:49
I think the whole concept of day zero was a very kind of sharp communication tool. It was getting closer and closer. You know, it felt like this meteorite about to fall on the city. And that was the day, not quite the day that the city would run out of water, but it was the day that the taps would be turned off and we could see this meteorite approaching, because we could see the levels of the dams getting lower and lower. And at the point when the dams got to only 13% full, that would be Day Zero. The magic trick that we had was to try and extend the distance between us, and Day Zero was to use as little water as possible. So the more we saved, the more we pushed.
Audie Cornish
00:14:38
But just even how you explained it, now I can see how it would work. Yeah, so to speak. Right. That the that people in the city, kids, adults, businesses would feel a kind of urgency when it's framed this way.
Christine Colvin
00:14:53
Absolutely. And everybody was talking about it as well. It was the topic of conversation. People on the taxis, on the busses, in the workplace, in restaurants, everybody, you know wanted to know about what they should talk about it. What are you doing? How are you saving water and even the issue of drought shaming? Initially, when the drought struck, there were a lot of people who felt very entitled to use as much water as they liked, especially if they could afford to pay for it, and they didn't see why they should have to curtail their use. But it quickly became understood that, no, that's not going to work. We all have to save water and we all have to stay within daily limits.
Audie Cornish
00:15:35
So, Fabiola, when you hear this, where is Mexico in this process of worrying about the water? Is it starting to feel urgent in the city?
Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez
00:15:47
Absolutely. People is very worried about their future, the future of their families, the future of this of the city. They are trying to change the narrative. Some people is trying not to use the day zero as a concept. They are thinking more to talk about the water crisis, because Day Zero creating a lot of anxiousness for the people of despair, even angry. They are demanding to the government to find a solution. And in addition to that, several regions in the country, particularly in the west part of the city, they usually face water shortages. They receive the water once or twice per week, regularly in average. But right now they haven't received water for a couple of months.
Audie Cornish
00:16:43
What I hear you saying is that the Day Zero concept actually maybe worked a little too well. Sort of scared some people. Also that there are parts of the city where people already struggled with access to water, and they don't love hearing that. Now they have to take even less, right when they already feel like, wait a second, we didn't even get to use any of this water that you're all worried about. And now we have no deliveries, no access. I mean, I'd be angry too.
Christine Colvin
00:17:14
Yeah, I find it fascinating that you're already getting water cuts, particularly in the poorest areas, because that was something that in Cape Town it was always leveling down. So from everybody having access to as much water as they could afford, as they could pay for, then we had like a daily limit of don't use more than 150l a day and don't use more than 100l a day. And so it went down over the period of almost a year.
Audie Cornish
00:17:47
Christine, you mentioned the idea of, kind of drought shaming or that, the kind of cultural conversation shifted to the point where the wealthier big consumers, they couldn't just use as much water they want without other people noticing and kind. Have shaming them about it. And I'm wondering, for Fabiola, is that the place you're trying to get to right now?
Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez
00:18:11
Yes, I think so. We need. We need a compromise. A compromise for not only the population. Also from the industry. In Mexico, the industry have their own wells. They don't use a surface water. That means the water coming from rivers, from lagoons. They pump the water from aquafiers.
Audie Cornish
00:18:37
Underground.
Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez
00:18:38
Underground. We have right now the political will and everybody is willing to discuss how we can prepare and adapt for these water crisis, because based on what we have studied in terms of climate change impacts and climate variability, we think that these water crisis will be more frequent and more intense. Even though we are struggling with this water crisis, it's a great opportunity to think differently, to change the paradigm, to change the narrative, to make all the changes that the sectors have refused to do in the previous years.
Audie Cornish
00:19:27
What I hear is talking about everyone coming to the table and talking about what needs to be done. But I also, in the back of my mind, I'm remembering you talking about the idea that Cape Town had to go through like five stages of grief in terms of dealing with this crisis. So what stage is this? Is this bargaining where everyone comes around and is like, we should do something about this. What would you like to do? No, what would you like to do?
Christine Colvin
00:19:53
Yeah, thankfully they've got past denial and realizing that this is a real problem and getting to that kind of bargaining point is important. But often when people are sitting around the table, they still feel as though, well, I'm going to get out of this bargain pretty much unscathed. We went through this in Cape Town. It would be it's okay. I can maintain my factory's production at its normal levels because I'm drilling a borehole. So I'm going to I'm actually going to have the same amount of water as I always had. So I'm going to be okay. And then you start talking to the company about and what about your workforce? What about your workforce? When everybody in the city has to queue up for six hours a day to get 25l of water per person in a bucket and take that home, and that's all that they have to use. And I think what became apparent as day zero got closer was that you just looking after yourself and drilling your own borehole and having your own independent source that you feel now you have control over is not enough. We have to have a collective response to the crisis that everybody's in because, you know, if you're not, then going to share that water with everybody else, that's it's really not going to work when push comes to shove and the reality of the situation starts to take hold.
Audie Cornish
00:21:16
I also don't want to bypass the denial part of the five stages. And because there are those people who are like, well, it's going to rain.
Christine Colvin
00:21:25
Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:21:27
Which I thought was a joke. But there are those people, right? Yeah.
Christine Colvin
00:21:30
And we can pray for rain and that that there are different ways out of it. And also I think there's in between I think it's in between denial and bargaining is blaming. So you trying to shift the blame on to everybody else. We would see people obviously blaming the Green Lawn brigade who want to have their irrigation going. Then they would try and blame the farmers who would try and blame the industry, who would, you know? And actually, at the end of the day, just about everybody, apart from those people who are already queuing up for very limited water, share some responsibility and have to be part of the solution as well.
Audie Cornish
00:22:09
Fabiola for you I know there actually is some debate among some politicians and scientists about when Mexico City could run out of water. Do you consider that denial? I mean, do you do you hear people still having a big dialog about whether this is true?
Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez
00:22:27
Yes. People is thinking that probably in June we will have a rain. The rain will start. And then the problem of this water crisis will lower down. And I think that's a denial, because I think we are experiencing maybe in a short term, what we will dealing in the future. We need to be prepared and we need to change the solutions that we are using.
Audie Cornish
00:22:58
I mean, it's interesting because I think there is a broader conversation in the community concerned about climate change, about less talk that induces panic and more talk that induces adaptation. Christine, for you, do you get the sense there is a movement among people who do your work to talk about concerns differently, like how do you communicate?
Christine Colvin
00:23:23
Yeah, very much.
Audie Cornish
00:23:24
Or maybe it's a lesson from the Cape Town experience.
Christine Colvin
00:23:27
Yeah. I mean, I think within our sector, the water sector knows it's going to be on the frontlines of the climate crisis. And I think it faces huge challenges, both in terms of drought and floods. But they're equally issues that that the sector itself can't solve on their own. But one of the things we always say as well is water doesn't come from a tap. Ultimately, water comes from nature and water has always come from nature, and we have always taken for granted the role that nature plays in our water cycle. You know, we build a dam assuming that the catchment is going to flow, you know, allow water to flow into the river and that will fill the dam. We put in boreholes and wells to get groundwater, assuming that the rain will fall and that will recharge through and get to the aquifer. But we can no longer make that assumption, because we have messed with nature to such an extent that the catchments are no longer yielding what they used to yield. So this is what we mean when we talk about kind of climate resilience and really fundamentally rethinking our whole water system from the catchment all the way through to the coast, what do we need to do differently? And it's not just when we say we it's not. It can't just be the people who are managing the pipes and taps. It also has to be farmers and foresters and those who have other impacts on the rivers and on the headwaters, on the water source areas as well.
Audie Cornish
00:25:06
This strikes me as one of those areas where there's kind of a Cassandra element to it, like you're trying to tell a lot of people that something terrible is going to happen, and they don't necessarily want to believe it until it's happening. And how do you... What does that like for you? I mean, like, do you have days where you come home and you're just like, nobody is listening. I have that as a journalist. So I, I would say.
Christine Colvin
00:25:34
Days, I would say years.
Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez
00:25:38
Really? Definitely. We model climate change impacts and water availability almost ten years ago. And we communicate this reduction and the possibility of a drought and the reduction of water availability by 30%. And we didn't identify that they believe that this could happen. And, and and we were very frustrated because we think that in these ten years we could build infrastructure, change the narrative, the perception, change consumption habits too from different sectors, industry. Yeah. But but fortunately, I think that now in this crisis, a lot of people is listening the message. This crisis creates a huge opportunity for the whole country to create conscious in terms of of the people to demand authorities to invest, to demand the private sector to use treated wastewater and then allow that the drinkable water be used for priority uses, not only for human consumption, also for ecosystems, because we need to think about ecosystem because they are the source of water.
Audie Cornish
00:27:06
I think it's very easy for an audience like ours to just assume like, well, we're not Mexico City. We have elaborate wastewater systems, we have this, we have that. But from your position as someone who like, help deal with this issue in Cape Town, how do you think about that, that idea of exceptionalism, like, it's not going to happen to us.
Christine Colvin
00:27:29
Yeah. I think for everyone who's living on this planet, given where we're headed with the climate crisis, we are all going to experience a change in our water cycle as we're experiencing the changing climate. There's nobody who can escape this. We can't buy our way out of this problem. And even as the engineers in the City of Cape Town said during the crisis, you cannot build your way out of a crisis. You have to do the building in anticipation of the crisis. But once you're in it, it's all about very careful measuring, saving and going for some quick wins and short term solutions. I think that there were many people in the Cape Town drought crisis who felt that it didn't affect them, that it couldn't affect them, and that they were in some way insulated from it. But when you realize that where the food you eat comes from, where the people you work with, who are going to be affected by it, it's we're all going to be touched by a water crisis in some way in the near future. It's unavoidable.
Audie Cornish
00:28:44
Christine Colvin is the water policy lead at the World Wildlife Fund, and Fabiola Sosa Rodriguez is the head of economic growth and environment at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. I also want to thank CNN's Laura Patterson, whose fantastic reporting on the Mexico City water crisis inspired us to do this episode. And you can find the link to her stories in our show notes. The assignment is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Isoke Samuel. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez, Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN audio. We got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Thanks, as always to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. Thank you for listening.