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[narrator] Turn on a faucet
and clean water rushes out,
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as much as we want, anytime we want.
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It's easy to forget
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that the quest for this has been one of
the defining struggles of human history.
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Civilizations that harnessed water,
thrived.
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The ones that failed... fell.
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Today, seven in ten people on Earth
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can count on having running water
in their homes.
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[man] The water flows from the risers
to connecting mains,
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and finally through service connections
into each building on the street.
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[narrator] At least, so they think.
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Cape Town. It could become
the first major city in the world
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to run out of water.
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Cape Town, South Africa,
is inching closer now to Day Zero.
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Just 92 days away from having to shut off
most water taps
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because of a severe drought.
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[narrator] Cape Town is the
first major city in the world
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to plan to indefinitely shut off
its water supply.
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Four million people
would stop getting running water.
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They'd get water rations,
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and they'd need to line up
at city water stations to get it.
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And it's not just Cape Town.
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São Paulo, Melbourne, Jakarta, London,
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Beijing, Istanbul, Tokyo, Bangalore,
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Barcelona and Mexico City
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will all face their own Day Zero
in the next few decades,
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unless their water use radically changes.
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There are perceptions that it is there
in bountiful amounts
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and everyone has access to it
because you can turn a tap,
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and that's a big problem.
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[narrator] In fact, by 2040
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most of the world won't have enough water
to meet demand year-round.
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We're facing a global
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water crisis and it's getting worse.
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We're at a real inflection point where,
if we're not careful,
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we may actually get out ahead
of our ability to manage it.
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[narrator] There's no substitute
for water.
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Each of us will die in just a few days
without it.
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How have we built a world
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where we don't have enough
of its most valuable resource?
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And as this crisis grows,
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what will the new world look like?
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[man] Waterways, built by the people to free the land of the tyranny of nature.
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For some investors,
what they see in this glass
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is liquid gold.
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Clean water. Now. -[crowd chants]
-[speaking Spanish]
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[man 2] Water becomes a commodity;
takes on new value.
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People claim it, haul it, treasure it.
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[man 3] Dare we take our water supply
for granted as we do the air we breathe?
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[narrator] Earth is the blue planet.
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There's no shortage of water. We have
326 million trillion gallons of it.
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Always have, always will.
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Water may freeze into ice
or evaporate into air,
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but it doesn't leave our planet.
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If you sucked up all the water on Earth,
it would fit into this sphere.
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But 97% of it is salty
and 2% is trapped in ice at the poles,
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so all of humankind relies on
just 1% of that water to survive.
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When people talk about
running out of water,
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what they really mean is,
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do they have access
to that very small percentage?
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[narrator] And the answer depends a lot
on where you live.
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Kuwait is one of the poorest countries
in terms of water per capita,
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and Canada, one of the richest,
doesn't have twice as much
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or even ten times as much.
It has 10,000 times as much.
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But it also matters where the water is.
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That 1% of Earth's water
that we all rely on,
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most of it is underground and really
difficult and expensive to get to,
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so humans have mostly settled close to
surface water, like rivers and lakes.
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Around 90% of the world's population
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lives less than ten kilometers
from a freshwater source.
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Hundreds of years ago, when the Aztecs
settled on what is now Mexico City,
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they saw a giant lake.
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These are the last remnants
of the canals they made.
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When the Spanish came in the 16th century,
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one soldier marveled at the Aztec city
rising from the water
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that seemed like an enchanted vision.
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But then the Spanish
started draining the lake,
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and over the next few centuries
that space was filled by people.
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Like in most places,
surface water in Mexico
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was treated as a public resource,
key to development.
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And since 1950, Mexico City's population
has exploded.
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It's now home to 22 million people.
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I would say some of the most important
threats for Mexico City...
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are related to water.
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[narrator] Mexico City gets more rain
than notoriously rainy London.
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But the lakes that would have
collected that water are long gone,
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so the city floods.
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But they still need to pipe in
most of their water
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from other parts of Mexico.
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Or they pump it from underground.
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We've gotten a lot better
at accessing groundwater.
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But there's a catch.
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Those water deposits, called aquifers,
have accumulated over millennia
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and they'll take millennia
to fill back up.
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Groundwater is sort of like
the savings account,
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which it's fine to draw on sometimes,
especially when you have a drought.
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[narrator] That's not what
Mexico City's been doing.
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We take out from the local aquifer
around 50% of our water supply.
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That means that probably we'll lose
half of our supply of water
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in the next 30-50 years.
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[narrator] Sucking up that groundwater
has another side effect.
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It compresses the soil.
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Mexico City is literally sinking.
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In some places,
as much as nine inches a year.
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NASA satellite data shows aquifers
in northern India
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decreasing by 29 trillion gallons
in just a decade.
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There are simply more people on Earth
consuming more water.
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This century, water consumption
has increased sevenfold.
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And the rain and snow that we count on
to water crops and refill lakes and rivers
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is getting less reliable.
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[Otto] Climate change is making
available water much more erratic.
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We're seeing areas around the world
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that are experiencing
much more extended dry periods.
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[narrator] But the problem isn't just that
there's more people on Earth using water,
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it's how we're using water.
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Humans need to drink
almost a gallon of water per day.
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Brushing your teeth, washing your hands
typically uses about a gallon.
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[flushes]
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There goes three gallons.
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But the drinking, washing
and toilet flushing
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of every person on Earth only accounts for
8% of our freshwater use each year.
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Most of the water goes to agriculture
and industry,
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and into the food and products we use.
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Let's take a bottle of Coca-Cola.
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98% of the water in that bottle
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is not what you see in that bottle.
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98% of the water is actually embedded
in all the ingredients that were grown
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to make that bottle of Coca-Cola.
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[narrator] 74 liters of water
goes into every glass of beer.
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A cup of coffee? 130 liters.
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Each of your cotton shirts - 2,500 liters.
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But nothing has as much embedded water
as meat.
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Alfalfa is a common ingredient
in cattle feed,
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and growing a kilogram of it
takes 510 liters of water.
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An average cow consumes about 12 kilograms
of feed a day.
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Divided up,
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just one quarter-pound hamburger takes
around 1,650 liters of water to produce.
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The world is eating more and more
like Americans.
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Higher calorie diets with more meat.
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But everyone can't eat like Americans.
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There actually isn't enough water
in the world.
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Water doesn't abide by
some of the basic rules of capitalism.
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Farmers hardly pay anything for it.
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So the true cost of water
doesn't end up in the cost of the burger.
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Which is why those fast food places
can offer you bargain burgers.
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[man 1] How can it be 99 cents?
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[man 2] For only 2.99.
You heard right: 2.99.
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[narrator] In most places in the world,
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water is treated and priced
like there will always be enough of it.
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So we end up using it
in absurdly wasteful ways.
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Arid Southern California uses over
two trillion gallons of water a year
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to grow alfalfa, which they get from
the Colorado River,
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hundreds of miles away.
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The amount they pay for it
doesn't even cover the cost of delivery.
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Just a fraction of the water
used by South Africa's wine industry
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would be enough for Cape Town's taps.
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India and China both grow
their most water-intensive crops
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in some of their driest regions.
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But as water gets more scarce,
that may change.
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The bank Goldman Sachs
predicted that water would be
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the petroleum of the 21st century.
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And private interests, like hedge funds,
have started buying up water,
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prompting fears that they'll take
advantage of scarcity to turn a profit.
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And if that sounds like a villain's plot
in a James Bond movie,
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that's because it was.
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As of this moment,
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my organization owns more than 60%
of Bolivia's water supply.
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This contract states that
your new government...
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will use us as utilities provider.
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[narrator] But putting a higher price
on water might have benefits.
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The benefit of valuing water as we should
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and sending, you know, a price signal,
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is that we wouldn't be growing alfalfa
in the desert.
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[narrator] Remember that point.
It'll be important later.
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We wouldn't be growing crops that don't
make sense in really arid places.
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Because the economics of it
wouldn't make sense.
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[narrator] And 95% of the
irrigated farmland in the world
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probably wouldn't use the most inefficient
irrigation method...
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just flooding the fields.
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And if water had a higher price,
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governments might decide
it's worth the money
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to repair our water infrastructure.
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[Kramer] We are not investing
the financial resources needed
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to make a good maintenance of the system.
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One critical result of this
is that we have 42% of leakages
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in the water network.
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[narrator] Mexico City, which is facing
an existential water crisis,
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loses close to half of its drinking water
to leaky pipes.
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We value water so little,
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we dump two million tons
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of sewage and agricultural
and industrial waste into it every day.
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There's no sense of value
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to what is really an incredibly
invaluable resource in water.
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But then when we run out,
we find what the cost of water truly is.
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[yelling]
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[speaking Spanish]
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[narrator] In 2017,
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the city of Mexicali finalized a deal
with Constellation Brands,
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00:10:32,466 --> 00:10:34,677
the maker of Modelo and Corona beers,
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to construct a brewery.
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It would be the biggest investment
the region had seen in years,
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creating 750 permanent jobs.
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And, in exchange, the brewery
was guaranteed a lot of water.
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But Mexicali doesn't have a lot of water
to spare.
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Its main water source
is the Colorado River, which starts in Colorado, in the U.S.
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Fed by melting snow
in the Rocky Mountains,
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warmer temperatures in recent years
have meant less snow,
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which means less river.
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You can tell how much less
by that big bathtub ring.
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The river flows south, quenching a few
American cities along the way,
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like Denver, Salt Lake City,
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Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
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Oh, and almost six million acres
of farmland.
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By the time the Colorado River
reaches Mexicali,
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it looks like this.
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[man, in Spanish] It's been a long time
since we've had enough water.
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If the brewery settles in
and starts producing, in a few years...
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we'll run out of underground water.
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[in Spanish] The farmers are the ones
who get the worst of it.
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[in Spanish] They need 20 million
cubic meters per year.
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If we compare that to, say,
cities such as Ensenada,
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which need nine million cubic meters,
it's more than double.
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More than double of a city.
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[narrator] The more scarce water gets,
more access to it becomes a competition,
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with winners and losers,
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often with governments picking.
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In July 2018,
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00:12:09,438 --> 00:12:11,648
the federal government of Mexico
issued a decree
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00:12:11,732 --> 00:12:15,319
making it easier for businesses
like Constellation Brands
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to extract surface water
all around the country.
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[in Spanish] We see this as a stick-up.
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It's also a warning not only for
the Mexican people but the entire world.
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We know that many other parts of the world
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00:12:30,125 --> 00:12:34,338
are fighting against these
privatization projects
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that line the companies' pockets.
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[narrator] In January 2018,
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00:12:38,759 --> 00:12:41,637
protesters tried to physically block
the construction
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of the brewery's aqueduct.
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[in Spanish] The entire group of policemen
came through that road in the front.
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They came here with their
protective shields, in a single file.
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She's the lady that shows up in the video
holding a pipe.
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[in Spanish] But we have to defend
our water.
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Because it's a vital liquid.
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It's the most important thing
we have right now.
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[narrator] Water scarcity is increasingly
driving violent conflict around the world.
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My personal experiences
of where this has been dire
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have been in northeast Nigeria.
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As we saw over the years
of the drying up of Lake Chad
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so did livelihoods dry up.
And that tension really did erupt
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in a way in which governments
could no longer contain it.
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[narrator] Water scarcity is at the heart
of the ongoing conflict in Darfur
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which, since 2003, has claimed
hundreds of thousands of lives.
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00:13:40,612 --> 00:13:43,574
And some analysts say the Syrian civil war
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was caused in large part
by a severe drought in 2006.
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As tensions rise over freshwater,
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governments are increasingly eyeing
an idea that was once far-fetched.
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Creating more of it.
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Desalination of ocean water
has more than doubled over the last decade
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but the amount we make a year
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still adds up to less than 1%
of the water we use.
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We've been waiting for the holy grail
of breakthrough in how expensive it is
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to desalinate water,
that is to take ocean or brackish water
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that has a lot of salts in it,
from underground,
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and treat it to drinking-water standards.
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That takes a lot of money and it takes
a huge amount of energy right now.
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[narrator] That would make more sense
if water was more valuable.
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But that would also mean
the water in everything would cost more.
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The price of consumer goods
would skyrocket.
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Some industries might collapse.
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Companies like Constellation Brands
might make different decisions
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about where they set up their operations.
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Because remember...
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The benefit of valuing water as we should
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and sending, you know, a price signal,
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is that we wouldn't be growing alfalfa
in the desert.
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[narrator] Growing cattle feed
in the desert.
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That's what the Mena family does.
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And if water suddenly became
the next petroleum,
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they'd be out of a living, too.
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The thing is, water isn't like petroleum.
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Or any other commodity on Earth,
for that matter.
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Because without water, we die.
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In 2010, the UN recognized access to water
and sanitation as a human right.
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And that's the challenge
of our water crisis.
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How are you supposed to value
an invaluable resource
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while ensuring everybody has it?
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When the price of water is raised,
to fix pipes or encourage conservation,
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it has the greatest impact on the poor.
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Sydney water is pushing for a 15% hike
over four years,
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putting more pressure
on family budgets.
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This drive for water conservation,
water saving,
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is now a burden that poor people
must carry.
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Living on a fixed income,
I cannot afford any of this.
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[narrator] It might be that we don't
end up treating all water equally.
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We know that there is
a certain percentage of water,
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it's around 60 liters per day per person,
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that is associated with
human rights issues,
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but above that,
people should pay for water.
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[narrator] In 2017,
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Philadelphia started experimenting
with tying water prices to income.
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We need to price it in such a way
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that we protect basic human needs.
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[narrator] The fact that we all need water
makes this crisis exceptionally hard.
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But it can also inspire people
to act in exceptional ways to solve it.
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Cape Town's Day Zero was first scheduled
for March 18.
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But then people started conserving.
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The water restrictions are
clearly having some effect.
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Day Zero has been pushed back by a month.
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[woman] Cape Town announced
it pushed back Day Zero until July 9th.
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Authorities expect Day Zero,
as it's been dubbed,
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to take place at the end of August
instead of July.
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00:16:53,263 --> 00:16:55,432
Now, that's since been pushed back
to next year,
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00:16:55,515 --> 00:16:59,102
thanks to extraordinary efforts
of residents and authorities.
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[narrator] By early 2018,
the city's water consumption
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was less than half what it had been
just four years earlier, and the Day Zero countdown clock
was paused indefinitely.
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00:17:09,738 --> 00:17:14,534
Not enough action was taken
until they started talking about Day Zero.
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That really got people's attention.
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00:17:16,620 --> 00:17:17,954
And it was remarkable,
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00:17:18,038 --> 00:17:21,166
between the time that the city
started to talk about Day Zero
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00:17:21,792 --> 00:17:25,420
and, a month later, how much
people cut back their water use.
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00:17:25,504 --> 00:17:27,380
And it goes to show what we can do.
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[narrator] But Cape Town also got lucky.
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It rained.
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The trick is recognizing how valuable
water is before there isn't enough of it,
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00:17:36,765 --> 00:17:41,228
and remembering that our fates
are tied to what rushes out of our taps.
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[Kramer] Mexico City was founded
within a lake.
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But today our relation with water
is very distant.
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It's very important to recover
our historical consciousness with water.
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There are many actions individuals
can take in order to save water,