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Explained | World's Water Crisis | FULL EPISODE | Netflix — Transcript

by Netflix · 2,869 words · 335 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:06[narrator] Turn on a faucet and clean water rushes out,
0:10as much as we want, anytime we want.
0:13It's easy to forget that the quest for this
0:15has been one of the defining struggles of human history.
0:18Civilizations that harnessed water, thrived.
0:21The ones that failed... fell.
0:23Today, seven in ten people on Earth
0:26can count on having running water in their homes.
0:28[man] The water flows from the risers to connecting mains,
0:31and finally through service connections into each building on the street.
0:35[narrator] At least, so they think.
0:37Cape Town. It could become the first major city in the world
0:40to run out of water.
0:41Cape Town, South Africa, is inching closer now to Day Zero.
0:46Just 92 days away from having to shut off most water taps
0:49because of a severe drought.
0:51[narrator] Cape Town is the first major city in the world
0:54to plan to indefinitely shut off its water supply.
0:57Four million people would stop getting running water.
1:00They'd get water rations,
1:02and they'd need to line up at city water stations to get it.
1:05And it's not just Cape Town.
1:07São Paulo, Melbourne, Jakarta, London,
1:10Beijing, Istanbul, Tokyo, Bangalore,
1:12Barcelona and Mexico City
1:14will all face their own Day Zero in the next few decades,
1:18unless their water use radically changes.
1:21There are perceptions that it is there in bountiful amounts
1:24and everyone has access to it because you can turn a tap,
1:27and that's a big problem.
1:28[narrator] In fact, by 2040
1:31most of the world won't have enough water to meet demand year-round.
1:34We're facing a global water crisis and it's getting worse.
1:38We're at a real inflection point where, if we're not careful,
1:41we may actually get out ahead of our ability to manage it.
1:45[narrator] There's no substitute for water.
1:47Each of us will die in just a few days without it.
1:51How have we built a world
1:52where we don't have enough of its most valuable resource?
1:55And as this crisis grows,
1:57what will the new world look like?
2:00[man] Waterways, built by the people
2:01to free the land of the tyranny of nature.
2:03For some investors, what they see in this glass
2:06is liquid gold.
2:09Clean water. Now.
2:11[crowd chants]
2:12-[in Spanish] In defense of water. -[man 2] Water becomes a commodity.
2:15It takes on new value.
2:16People claim it, haul it, treasure it.
2:18[man 3] Dare we take our water supply for granted as we do the air we breathe?
2:30[narrator] Earth is the blue planet.
2:32There's no shortage of water. We have 326 million trillion gallons of it.
2:38Always have, always will.
2:40Water may freeze into ice or evaporate into air,
2:43but it doesn't leave our planet.
2:45If you sucked up all the water on Earth, it would fit into this sphere.
2:49But 97% of it is salty and 2% is trapped in ice at the poles,
2:53so all of humankind relies on just 1% of that water to survive.
2:57When people talk about running out of water,
3:00what they really mean is,
3:02do they have access to that very small percentage?
3:06[narrator] And the answer depends a lot on where you live.
3:09Kuwait is one of the poorest countries in terms of water per capita,
3:13and Canada, one of the richest, doesn't have twice as much
3:16or even ten times as much. It has 10,000 times as much.
3:20But it also matters where the water is.
3:23That 1% of Earth's water that we all rely on,
3:26most of it is underground and really difficult and expensive to get to,
3:30so humans have mostly settled close to surface water, like rivers and lakes.
3:35Around 90% of the world's population
3:37lives less than ten kilometers from a freshwater source.
3:42Hundreds of years ago, when the Aztecs settled on what is now Mexico City,
3:46they saw a giant lake.
3:47These are the last remnants of the canals they made.
3:51When the Spanish came in the 16th century,
3:54one soldier marveled at the Aztec city rising from the water
3:58that seemed like an enchanted vision.
4:00But then the Spanish started draining the lake,
4:03and over the next few centuries that space was filled by people.
4:07Like in most places, surface water in Mexico
4:11was treated as a public resource, key to development.
4:15And since 1950, Mexico City's population has exploded.
4:19It's now home to 22 million people.
4:22I would say some of the most important threats
4:26for Mexico City are related to water.
4:29[narrator] Mexico City gets more rain than notoriously rainy London.
4:32But the lakes that would have collected that water are long gone,
4:36so the city floods.
4:38But they still need to pipe in
4:39most of their water from other parts of Mexico.
4:42Or they pump it from underground.
4:44We've gotten a lot better at accessing groundwater.
4:48But there's a catch.
4:49Those water deposits, called aquifers, have accumulated over millennia
4:54and they'll take millennia to fill back up.
4:56Groundwater is sort of like the savings account,
5:00which it's fine to draw on sometimes, especially when you have a drought.
5:03[narrator] That's not what Mexico City's been doing.
5:06We take out from the local aquifer around 50% of our water supply.
5:12That means that probably we'll lose half of our supply of water
5:16in the next 30-50 years.
5:18[narrator] Sucking up that groundwater has another side effect.
5:21It compresses the soil.
5:23Mexico City is literally sinking.
5:25In some places, as much as nine inches a year.
5:29NASA satellite data shows aquifers in northern India
5:32decreasing by 29 trillion gallons in just a decade.
5:36There are simply more people on Earth consuming more water.
5:40This century, water consumption has increased sevenfold.
5:44And the rain and snow that we count on to water crops and refill lakes and rivers
5:49is getting less reliable.
5:51[Otto] Climate change is making available water much more erratic.
5:53We're seeing areas around the world
5:56that are experiencing much more extended dry periods.
5:59[narrator] But the problem isn't just that there's more people on Earth using water,
6:03it's how we're using water.
6:05Humans need to drink almost a gallon of water per day.
6:08Brushing your teeth, washing your hands typically uses about a gallon.
6:12[flushes]
6:15There goes three gallons.
6:17But the drinking, washing and toilet flushing
6:20of every person on Earth only accounts for 8% of our freshwater use each year.
6:25Most of the water goes to agriculture and industry,
6:28and into the food and products we use.
6:30Let's take a bottle of Coca-Cola.
6:3298% of the water in that bottle
6:35is not what you see in that bottle.
6:3698% of the water is actually embedded in all the ingredients that were grown
6:41to make that bottle of Coca-Cola.
6:43[narrator] 74 liters of water goes into every glass of beer.
6:47A cup of coffee? 130 liters.
6:49Each of your cotton shirts - 2,500 liters.
6:53But nothing has as much embedded water as meat.
6:56Alfalfa is a common ingredient in cattle feed,
6:59and growing a kilogram of it takes 510 liters of water.
7:03An average cow consumes about 12 kilograms of feed a day.
7:07Divided up,
7:08just one quarter-pound hamburger takes around 1,650 liters of water to produce.
7:15The world is eating more and more like Americans.
7:17Higher calorie diets with more meat.
7:20But everyone can't eat like Americans.
7:22There actually isn't enough water in the world.
7:25Water doesn't abide by some of the basic rules of capitalism.
7:29Farmers hardly pay anything for it.
7:32So the true cost of water doesn't end up in the cost of the burger.
7:36Which is why those fast food places can offer you bargain burgers.
7:39[man 1] How can it be 99 cents?
7:41[man 2] For only 2.99. You heard right: 2.99.
7:44[narrator] In most places in the world,
7:46water is treated and priced like there will always be enough of it.
7:50So we end up using it in absurdly wasteful ways.
7:54Arid Southern California uses over two trillion gallons of water a year
7:59to grow alfalfa, which they get from the Colorado River,
8:02hundreds of miles away.
8:04The amount they pay for it doesn't even cover the cost of delivery.
8:08Just a fraction of the water used by South Africa's wine industry
8:12would be enough for Cape Town's taps.
8:14India and China both grow their most water-intensive crops
8:18in some of their driest regions.
8:20But as water gets more scarce, that may change.
8:24The bank Goldman Sachs predicted that water would be
8:27the petroleum of the 21st century.
8:30And private interests, like hedge funds, have started buying up water,
8:34prompting fears that they'll take advantage of scarcity to turn a profit.
8:38And if that sounds like a villain's plot in a James Bond movie,
8:41that's because it was.
8:43As of this moment,
8:44my organization owns more than 60% of Bolivia's water supply.
8:49This contract states that your new government...
8:53will use us as utilities provider.
8:56[narrator] But putting a higher price on water might have benefits.
9:00The benefit of valuing water as we should
9:03and sending, you know, a price signal,
9:05is that we wouldn't be growing alfalfa in the desert.
9:08[narrator] Remember that point. It'll be important later.
9:12We wouldn't be growing crops that don't make sense in really arid places.
9:16Because the economics of it wouldn't make sense.
9:19[narrator] And 95% of the irrigated farmland in the world
9:22probably wouldn't use the most inefficient irrigation method...
9:28just flooding the fields.
9:30And if water had a higher price,
9:32governments might decide it's worth the money
9:34to repair our water infrastructure.
9:36[Kramer] We are not investing the financial resources needed
9:40to make a good maintenance of the system.
9:44One critical result of this is that we have 42% of leakages
9:50in the water network.
9:53[narrator] Mexico City, which is facing an existential water crisis,
9:57loses close to half of its drinking water to leaky pipes.
10:02We value water so little,
10:04we dump two million tons
10:06of sewage and agricultural and industrial waste into it every day.
10:10There's no sense of value
10:12to what is really an incredibly invaluable resource in water.
10:16But then when we run out, we find what the cost of water truly is.
10:20[yelling]
10:22[speaking Spanish]
10:26[narrator] In 2017,
10:28the city of Mexicali finalized a deal with Constellation Brands,
10:32the maker of Modelo and Corona beers,
10:35to construct a brewery.
10:37It would be the biggest investment the region had seen in years,
10:40creating 750 permanent jobs.
10:43And, in exchange, the brewery was guaranteed a lot of water.
10:47But Mexicali doesn't have a lot of water to spare.
10:51Its main water source is the Colorado River,
10:54which starts in Colorado, in the U.S.
10:57Fed by melting snow in the Rocky Mountains,
11:00warmer temperatures in recent years have meant less snow,
11:04which means less river.
11:06You can tell how much less by that big bathtub ring.
11:10The river flows south, quenching a few American cities along the way,
11:14like Denver, Salt Lake City,
11:17Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
11:22Oh, and almost six million acres of farmland.
11:25By the time the Colorado River reaches Mexicali,
11:28it looks like this.
11:29[man, in Spanish] It's been a long time since we've had enough water.
11:33If the brewery settles in and starts producing,
11:38in a few years, we'll run out of underground water.
11:41[in Spanish] The farmers are the ones who get the worst of it.
11:44[in Spanish] They need 20 million cubic meters per year.
11:47If we compare that to, say, cities such as Ensenada,
11:50which need nine million cubic meters, it's more than double.
11:56More than double of a city.
11:58[narrator] The more scarce water gets, more access to it becomes a competition,
12:02with winners and losers,
12:05often with governments picking.
12:07In July 2018,
12:09the federal government of Mexico issued a decree
12:11making it easier for businesses like Constellation Brands
12:15to extract surface water all around the country.
12:18[in Spanish] We see this as a stick-up.
12:20It's also a warning
12:22not only for the Mexican people but the entire world.
12:27We know that many other parts of the world
12:30are fighting against these privatization projects
12:34that line the companies' pockets.
12:36[narrator] In January 2018,
12:38protesters tried to physically block the construction
12:41of the brewery's aqueduct.
12:44[in Spanish] The entire group of policemen came through that road in the front.
12:49They came here with their protective shields, in a single file.
12:54She's the lady that shows up in the video holding a pipe.
13:00[in Spanish] But we have to defend our water.
13:03Because it's a vital liquid.
13:06It's the most important thing we have right now.
13:10[narrator] Water scarcity is increasingly driving violent conflict around the world.
13:15My personal experiences of where this has been dire
13:18have been in northeast Nigeria.
13:20As we saw over the years of the drying up of Lake Chad
13:24so did livelihoods dry up. And that tension really did erupt
13:28in a way in which governments could no longer contain it.
13:32[narrator] Water scarcity is at the heart of the ongoing conflict in Darfur
13:36which, since 2003, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
13:40And some analysts say the Syrian civil war
13:43was caused in large part by a severe drought in 2006.
13:48As tensions rise over freshwater,
13:51governments are increasingly eyeing an idea that was once far-fetched.
13:55Creating more of it.
13:58Desalination of ocean water has more than doubled over the last decade
14:02but the amount we make a year
14:04still adds up to less than 1% of the water we use.
14:08We've been waiting for the holy grail of breakthrough in how expensive it is
14:11to desalinate water, that is to take ocean or brackish water
14:14that has a lot of salts in it, from underground,
14:17and treat it to drinking-water standards.
14:19That takes a lot of money and it takes a huge amount of energy right now.
14:23[narrator] That would make more sense if water was more valuable.
14:27But that would also mean the water in everything would cost more.
14:30The price of consumer goods would skyrocket.
14:32Some industries might collapse.
14:35Companies like Constellation Brands might make different decisions
14:38about where they set up their operations.
14:40Because remember...
14:41The benefit of valuing water as we should
14:45and sending, you know, a price signal,
14:48is that we wouldn't be growing alfalfa in the desert.
14:51[narrator] Growing cattle feed in the desert.
14:53That's what the Mena family does.
14:55And if water suddenly became the next petroleum,
14:58they'd be out of a living, too.
15:00The thing is, water isn't like petroleum.
15:03Or any other commodity on Earth, for that matter.
15:06Because without water, we die.
15:09In 2010, the UN recognized access to water and sanitation as a human right.
15:15And that's the challenge of our water crisis.
15:17How are you supposed to value an invaluable resource
15:21while ensuring everybody has it?
15:24When the price of water is raised, to fix pipes or encourage conservation,
15:29it has the greatest impact on the poor.
15:31Sydney water is pushing for a 15% hike over four years,
15:35putting more pressure on family budgets.
15:37This drive for water conservation, water saving,
15:42is now a burden that poor people must carry.
15:44Living on a fixed income, I cannot afford any of this.
15:49[narrator] It might be that we don't end up treating all water equally.
15:52We know that there is a certain percentage of water,
15:56it's around 60 liters per day per person,
16:00that is associated with human rights issues,
16:04but above that, people should pay for water.
16:08[narrator] In 2017,
16:10Philadelphia started experimenting with tying water prices to income.
16:15We need to price it in such a way
16:17that we protect basic human needs.
16:21[narrator] The fact that we all need water makes this crisis exceptionally hard.
16:26But it can also inspire people to act in exceptional ways to solve it.
16:31Cape Town's Day Zero was first scheduled for March 18.
16:35But then people started conserving.
16:38The water restrictions are clearly having some effect.
16:41Day Zero has been pushed back by a month.
16:43[woman] Cape Town announced it pushed back Day Zero until July 9th.
16:47Authorities expect Day Zero, as it's been dubbed,
16:50to take place at the end of August instead of July.
16:53Now, that's since been pushed back to next year,
16:55thanks to extraordinary efforts of residents and authorities.
16:59[narrator] By early 2018, the city's water consumption
17:02was less than half what it had been just four years earlier,
17:06and the Day Zero countdown clock was paused indefinitely.
17:09Not enough action was taken until they started talking about Day Zero.
17:14That really got people's attention.
17:16And it was remarkable,
17:17between the time that the city started to talk about Day Zero
17:21and, a month later, how much people cut back their water use.
17:25And it goes to show what we can do.
17:27[narrator] But Cape Town also got lucky.
17:29It rained.
17:30The trick is recognizing how valuable water is before there isn't enough of it,
17:36and remembering that our fates are tied to what rushes out of our taps.
17:42[Kramer] Mexico City was founded within a lake.
17:46But today our relation with water is very distant.
17:50It's very important to recover our historical consciousness with water.
17:55There are many actions individuals can take in order to save water,
18:00but also to be aware that water has a value.

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