A collision of climate change, urban sprawl and poor infrastructure has brought the Mexican capital to the brink of a water crisis. The groundwater is disappearing. Last year was Mexico’s hottest and driest in at least 70 years. And one of the City’s major water systems faces a potential “Day Zero,” when it will no longer provide water.
“We are suffering because the City is growing excessively and there is no way to stop it.””said Gabriel Martínez, 64, who lives in an apartment complex struggling to get enough water for its roughly 600 residents.
Mexico City, once a water-rich valley that was drained to make way for a large city, has a metropolitan population of 23 million, among the 10 largest in the world. It is one of several major cities facing severe water shortages, many as a result of years of poor water management, compounded by low rainfall. And while Mexico City’s problems are getting worse, they are not new. Experts warned almost 20 years ago of dwindling water supplies, but to no avail.
“Mexico is the world’s largest market for bottled water,” said Roberto Constantino Toto, who heads the water research office at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. It is a reflection, he added, “of the failure of our water policy.”
Mexico has long been vulnerable to droughts, but almost 68 percent of the country suffers from moderate or extreme drought, reports the National Water Commission. The Cutzamala water system – one of the world’s largest networks of dams, canals and pipelines that supplies 27 percent of the Capital’s water – is at a historically low level of 30 percent of its normal capacity. Officials have projected June 26 as Day Zero, when the Cutzamala system could fall to the 20 percent baseline where it can no longer be exploited. The water level in one reservoir fell so low that officials suspended its use in April.
Groundwater, which supplies most of the City’s water, is extracted twice as fast as it is replenished, experts said. Water flows through old pipes along a 12,800-kilometer-long network vulnerable to earthquakes and subsidence, and where leaks have caused an estimated 35 percent loss.
Water has become an issue ahead of next month’s elections. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose advisers have said Day Zero will not happen, has insisted that his government is addressing the problems. He has proposed bringing in more water from outside the City.
Claudia Sheinbaum, the López Obrador protégé who resigned as Mexico City’s mayor last year to become the leading presidential candidate, has defended her handling of the crisis.
Some areas of Mexico City have long lacked sufficient drinking water, including Iztapalapa, a working-class community and the capital’s most populous district with 1.8 million inhabitants.. Residents depend on municipal tankers to fill cisterns or water tanks. But as water becomes scarcer, new areas face rationing: 284 neighborhoods this year, including some more prosperous, compared to 147 in 2007.
“Districts that have never suffered water problems in their lives will have to learn to deal with it,” said Adriana Gutiérrez, 50, who manages a 154-unit apartment complex in Iztapalapa that relies on tanker trucks.
There is no evidence that the drought is attributable to climate change. But the effects worsen with rising temperatures. Mexico City’s average temperature increased around 3 degrees Celsius in the last century, more than double the global average. The most recent Water Risk Atlas, published by the World Resources Institute, describes Mexico City as facing “extremely high” water stress, its highest category.
The Day Zero warning has helped draw public attention to the problem. Lizbeth Martínez García, 26, who lives in Iztapalapa, where a weekly tanker truck fills the tanks that supply her building, said she asked the delivery man about the future. He told her that the future meant even less water.
“We are afraid,” he said.
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