Climatologist is urging the City of Cape Town to focus on reducing water demand

A climatologist is urging the City of Cape Town to focus on reducing water demand as low rainfall and high usage place pressure on the metro’s supply.

Over the past week Cape Town’s dam levels dropped to just over 50 percent after water consumption spiked to a billion litres a day .

That’s more than 80 million litres above the city’s daily target.

Applied Climatologist Peter Johnston said that while cape town’s catchment systems are designed to meet the city’s needs expanding supply is not easy.

Johnston said that the city should be looking at measures to cut demand including incentives for households that use less water.

"What we do is we say well if people are using less than a certain amount of water per household then they get a reduced price. As soon as they go over that then the prices increase quite drastically because I think we have to realise that it's up to us as citizens to reduce our water usage so that we can have water in the future."