Klaus Eickelmann, Somerset West
I refer to Patrick Dowling’s article (“Ten good things about Cape Town’s drought”, Bolander, March 21). While I fully agree with his thoughts and conclusions, I couldn’t help notice that there is one aspect – arguably the most important one – missing from the equation, namely our population growth rate.
Africa’s population currently exceeds one billion.
According to the United Nations this will rise to four billion by the end of the century.
Even if for the moment, one adopts the optimistic attitude that the pattern in South Africa may not be quite so dramatic, the question still begs to be answered where the water for all these people will come from, not to talk about other essentials like food, housing, transport
etc?
Since Patrick Dowling is neither God nor Cyril Ramaphosa, I don’t really expect an answer from him, but world leaders better start putting their thinking caps on, because if mankind does not resolve the world-wide water crisis, the human tide will once again sweep up north to Europe, as we have seen in recent years.
