The Environment Agency has slashed its water-use inspections by almost a half over the past five years. Environment Agency officers visited people and businesses with licences to abstract, or take, water from rivers and aquifers 4,539 times in 2018-19, but this dropped to 2,303 inspections in 2022-23, according to data obtained by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations.
Cape Town teeters on the edge of Day Zero – the time when water will no longer flow from its taps. But poorer residents are first the feel the thirst and say water rationing is slowly killing them. Rachel and Leana speak to Cape Town residents, including Faeza Meyer from the African Water Commons Collective, about the desperate situation, and interview Professor Hannah Cloke from the University of Reading, whose new study shows that it is the ‘elite’ – people who have swimming pools and large gardens – who are driving water crisis just as much as climate change and population growth.
In each episode, investigative journalists Leana Hosea and Rachel Salvidge bring you tales from the frontline of the water crisis, interviewing:
Water is being overlooked in climate planning and funding, experts have said, despite half the world’s population facing acute water stress by 2030.
At the UN Water Conference in New York, the Secretary-General said “vampiric overuse” and pollution are draining the “precious lifeblood” while climate change is “wreaking havoc” on the natural water cycle.
England faces an ‘ecological disaster’ if a severe drought strikes, with water companies turning to rivers to avoid drinking water shortages. Analysis of water companies’ plans reveals huge shortfall in the case of severe drought if no action is taken.
Native Americans are dying from Covid-19 at a rate five times that of their white counterparts.