But now, five years later, a family of Wyoming oil tycoons is bringing the Keystone concept back from the dead — and the Trump administration is signaling its support. Last week, President Trump signed a presidential permit for the so-called Bridger expansion pipeline, which would likely deliver oil from the carbon-intensive Alberta tar sands to a pipeline hub in central Wyoming, 647 miles away. From there, the oil could move through other pipelines to key refineries as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.

“Slightly different than the last administration,” Trump said ⁠at the White House last Thursday when he signed the presidential permit. “They wouldn’t sign a pipeline deal, and we have pipelines going up.”

The presidential permit gives the project the green light to transport oil across international borders, and it’s only the latest step in what appears to be a fast-tracked timeline for the revived tar sands pipeline. Last month, the federal Bureau of Land Management announced that it would begin conducting an environmental review of the project on an expedited schedule. (The Trump administration has shortened many of the environmental review processes required for pipeline construction.) Bridger Pipeline, the company behind the project, says it wants to begin construction next year and start moving oil in 2028.

The pipeline would carry at least 550,000 barrels of crude oil per day. That’s only about two-thirds of what Keystone XL would have carried, but it could expand to a peak capacity even larger than what was originally planned — more than 1 million barrels a day. The similarity between the new pipeline’s path and Keystone’s has led some opponents to call the successor “Keystone Light.” The Canadian portion of the new pipeline would be built by a company called South Bow, which was spun off from TC Energy, the company behind the original Keystone XL line.

The proposed pipeline would be one of the biggest new fossil fuel developments of Donald Trump’s second presidency. It comes at a time of growing oil production in Alberta and skyrocketing global crude prices due to the war the president is waging in Iran. The project is being pushed by the True family, a clan of oilmen with a long history of drilling in the Rockies — and a history of oil spills from pipelines across the region.

“We know that there is limited pipeline capacity to move Canadian crude oil, and we have extensive experience in the Rocky Mountains,” said Bill Salvin, a spokesperson for Bridger Pipeline, the True family pipeline company proposing the project.

The True business empire dates back to the 1940s, when a wildcatter named Henry Alphonso “Dave” True Jr. began exploring for oil in Wyoming. He and his three sons expanded their company into a network of almost a dozen corporations that includes a drilling company, a network of local oil pipelines, a trucking company, an oil trading company, an oil equipment company, a geothermal energy firm, and a real estate company called Brick & Bond, according to a Grist review of corporate records. They also invested in cattle ranching, becoming some of the state’s largest landowners. One of True’s sons, Diemer True, served for two decades in the Wyoming legislature.

This corporate expansion has given the four-generation True family outsize influence in a state that doesn’t produce much oil but neighbors the massive Bakken shale formation of North Dakota, which is served by some of the True family pipelines. The family name is synonymous with oil in Wyoming, and True family members have become prominent donors to the University of Wyoming and to a conservative legal foundation in the region. The Trues have also run afoul of the federal government: Several members of the family engaged in a 10-year dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over what the government said was a strategy to evade some taxes by shuttling ranchland purchases between different companies. (The case ended in a multimillion-dollar fine against the Trues, which was upheld by an appellate court in 2004.)

“They’re very prominent, and their business interests have spread all around the West,” said Phil Roberts, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wyoming and an expert on the state’s oil industry. He noted that families like the Trues have shifted away from oil production as the state’s fields have declined, investing in pipelines and oilfield services to maintain their revenue.

“Those fields have gotten really worn out, so they’ve had to diversify,” said Roberts.

Tad True, the grandson of the True who first struck oil in Wyoming, has led the family’s pipeline business for most of this century, expanding its network to more than 4,000 miles across Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. He argued as early as 2006 that more pipeline development was needed in order for regional oil producers to remain competitive, and in a 2012 testimony before the House of Representatives he said that the Obama administration’s regulations were blocking the pipelines needed for the fracking boom that was then in full swing. True spoke at the Republican National Convention the same year, accusing Obama of “playing politics” with the Keystone XL pipeline, which the then-president had rejected the previous year. (While the pipeline was primarily intended to carry Canadian shale oil to American markets, it would also have included an “on ramp” for crude from True’s part of the country.)

True’s company, Bridger Pipeline, has a history of oil spills. In 2015, one of the pipelines it operated ruptured underneath the Yellowstone River after fast-moving waters eroded sediment and rock from the riverbed. At least 30,000 gallons of crude oil streamed into the river, contaminating the water supplies of Glendive, Montana. The town had to truck in bottles of drinking water after some residents noticed an odor in their tap water. Then, just a year later, another pipeline operated by one of the company’s subsidiaries leaked 600,000 gallons into a stream in North Dakota — almost enough oil to fill an Olympic-sized pool. Another pipeline broke several years later, dumping 45,000 gallons of oil onto ranchland in Wyoming. The company ultimately paid $1 million in fines to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality for the 2015 spill and $12.5 million for the 2016 spill.

In total, there have been at least 42 spills as a result of pipeline operations by True subsidiaries since 2010. According to data collected by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, more than a third of those spills had detrimental effects on the environment or people. The data shows that the Bridger Pipeline company alone is responsible for seven of those spills in just the last three years. The most recent spill took place in March near Guernsey, Wyoming.

“That definitely sets off some alarm bells,” said Kenneth Clarkson, communications director with the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. “It’s not acceptable to have one incident, and when we have this quantity, it’s definitely troubling.”

If the expanded Bridger pipeline ultimately carries tar sands oil from Canada, as appears likely, the environmental consequences of a spill could be dire. Given the thick, viscous nature of tar sands, operators mix a type of thinner — called a “diluent” in technical parlance — to help it flow through pipelines. In the event of a rupture, the diluent can easily evaporate, leaving behind a heavy, tar-like substance that sinks to the bottom of rivers and other waterways. That particular property of tar sands made cleanup of the Kalamazoo River particularly complicated after a different company’s pipeline burst in southwestern Michigan in 2010.

“We regret any spill from our pipelines,” said Salvin, the Bridger spokesperson. “Anytime oil gets out of the line, that’s unacceptable to us, so we do everything possible to keep the oil in the line.” He said that Bridger will employ “horizontal drilling” to tunnel under rivers and streams, which he said would reduce the risk of ruptures. Salvin did not say what type of oil the pipeline would carry, but confirmed it would be engineered for “mostly heavy crude” from Alberta; the Canadian portion of the pipeline will begin in the town of Hardisty, in the heart of Alberta’s oil sands.

He also said the company would use advanced technology to monitor for leaks. In the aftermath of the 2015 spill, when North Dakota’s then-governor Doug Burgum challenged Tad True to prevent leaks, True created an artificial-intelligence software called Flowstate that analyzes pipelines for potential ruptures. Salvin said the company now uses the software on all its pipelines and markets it to other operators as well.

Even though the new proposed pipeline is similar to Keystone XL in length and size, it will only cost $2 billion, far less than Keystone’s $8 billion price tag. That’s because its route will largely follow existing infrastructure and rights-of-way established by True Companies pipelines. Salvin said that the company has held a dozen landowner meetings and has secured surveying easements, or allowances to scout the land for construction, from 374 of the 376 private landowners along the pipeline route. Unlike Keystone XL, the route does not cross any federally recognized tribal lands.

“We’re very familiar with what happened with the previous project,” said Salvin. “Given that we have existing pipeline corridors that we have access to, that’s one of the reasons why this makes such commercial sense to us.” Salvin declined to offer details about the financing of the project, and such details are not publicly available because Bridger is a privately held company.

The project must still secure a number of state and local permits, but so far it isn’t having any trouble with the Trump administration, which has been aggressive in supporting new oil and gas development. The line cuts through Montana and Wyoming, including public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, which is leading the federal government’s review of the project under the National Environmental Policy Act. Although the law typically requires the preparation of a detailed assessment of the project’s impact on wildlife and waterways, the bureau has suggested it might fast-track the pipeline’s review.

Past studies have found that it typically takes federal agencies more than two years to complete an environmental impact statement, but the Bureau has indicated in public filings that it intends to publish a final impact statement by next May and make a decision on the project, allowing the company to begin construction by July.

Though True family members do not appear to be particularly close allies of Trump himself, they have given more than $4 million to Republican candidates and political action committees since 1977, according to federal records. A combined $12,000 went to Trump’s unsuccessful reelection campaign in 2020, the only apparent record of True financial support for the president. Furthermore, six members of the True family appeared on a 2022 endorsement list for Liz Cheney, the Wyoming politician who lost her reelection bid after she voted to impeach Trump.

The business case for the new pipeline rests on a number of big assumptions. The existing pipelines from the tar sands are running near capacity, but the Bridger proposal assumes that production in Canada’s oil hub will continue to increase. Many forecasters aren’t so sure; even with prices high, current projections show that production growth is slowing and may peak in 2030 at around 3.5 million barrels a day, well under what the proponents of Keystone XL anticipated.

Second, the pipeline would only carry oil to central Wyoming, not all the way to the Nebraska refinery hub targeted by the original Keystone XL pipeline. Another company would need to build another pipeline across Nebraska in order for the crude to reach the major oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. (Salvin said Bridger is “exploring options” for that segment.) Third, it’s unclear if those refiners will even want as much of the heavy Canadian crude oil that the pipeline would offer, since imports of similar oil from Venezuela have started to tick up following Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and subsequent negotiations with the country’s new leadership.

“To call this plan half-baked would be an insult to baking,” wrote energy lawyer and anti-pipeline advocate Paul Blackburn in a blog post last month. Blackburn is an advisor to Bold Alliance, the activist network that opposed the last Keystone XL proposal.

Many of the same activist groups that opposed the prior pipeline are getting ready to oppose this one as well. The Bold Alliance, which organized tribes and rural landowners against Keystone, has said it will litigate any attempt to extend a pipeline into Nebraska. Jenny Harbine, a managing attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice, said her group is “keeping a close eye” to ensure federal and state agencies adequately consider environmental and safety concerns. The Bureau of Land Management and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which is coordinating its review with that of the federal government, closed an initial public comment period last week.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post A family of Wyoming oil tycoons is trying to revive Keystone appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Since then, Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency has shut down the agency’s website, locked employees out of their email accounts, and closed the agency’s Washington office. “USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk posted on X on Sunday. “Time for it to die.” (The agency is codified in federal law, and court challenges are likely to argue that Musk’s actions are themselves illegal.)

While criticisms of Trump’s abrupt demolition of USAID have largely focused on global public health projects that have long enjoyed bipartisan support, the effort also threatens billions of dollars meant to combat climate change. USAID’s climate-related funding helps low-income countries build renewable energy and adapt to worsening natural disasters, as well as conserve carbon sinks and sensitive ecosystems. During Joe Biden’s administration, USAID accelerated its climate-focused efforts as part of an ambitious new initiative that was supposed to last through the end of the decade. That effort now appears to have come to an abrupt end as USAID contractors around the world prepare to abandon critical projects and lay off staff.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has taken over USAID as acting director, has said that Musk’s abrupt shutdown is “not about getting rid of foreign aid.” But even if USAID eventually resumes operations to provide emergency humanitarian assistance such as famine support and HIV prevention, the agency is still likely to terminate all its climate-related work under the Trump administration. The result would be a blow to the landmark Paris climate agreement just as significant as Trump’s formal withdrawal of the United States from the international pact. By clawing back billions of dollars that Congress has already committed to the fight against global warming, the United States is poised to derail climate progress far beyond its own borders.

“This is taking a torch to development programs that the American people have paid for,” said Gillian Caldwell, who served as USAID’s chief climate officer under Biden. “Many commitments under the Paris Agreement are funding-contingent, and that’s very much in peril.”

The United States spends less than 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid, but that still makes the country the largest aid donor in the world by far. USAID distributes between US$40 billion and $60 billion per year – almost a quarter of all global humanitarian aid. While in recent years the largest shares of that aid have gone to Ukraine, Israel and Afghanistan, the agency also distributes billions of dollars to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where it primarily helps promote food security, health and sanitation, and education efforts.

In 2022, Caldwell led the launch of a sweeping new “climate strategy” that sought to reposition USAID’s work over the next decade to account for climate shocks. The first part of this initiative was a country-by-country review of existing aid flows in standard areas like food and sanitation. USAID offices around the world began tweaking their operations to ensure that the projects they were funding would hold up as temperatures continue to rise. For example, the agency would ensure that water and sewer systems could handle bigger floods, or would plan to inoculate against diseases that might spread faster in warm weather. The effort was especially important in sectors like agriculture, which is both emissions-heavy and extremely vulnerable to the weather shocks that come with even small climactic shifts.

“You’re going to be having a lot more demands on humanitarian assistance when you’ve got extreme weather events,” Caldwell said. “The point was to make sure that every dollar we’re spending is sensible given the world we live in today.”

In addition to that review, the agency also increased its direct spending on renewable energy, conservation and climate adaptation. The agency added dozens of new countries to its climate aid portfolio under Biden’s tenure, expanding in Southeast Asia and western Africa. USAID work has had a far greater effect on the climate fight than its raw spending, which totalled around US$600 million on climate efforts in 2023, would indicate. That’s because the agency’s support has also mobilized billions of dollars from the private sector, attracting investment from renewable-energy developers and insurance companies that offer drought and flood coverage to vulnerable areas abroad.

USAID’s renewable-energy efforts may be some of the most resilient to Trump’s shock attack, because they don’t rely on the agency’s continued involvement. USAID has helped several countries design and hold renewable-energy auctions, wherein private companies bid for the right to build new power facilities at low prices. These auctions save countries money and make it easier for them to attract private capital. In the Philippines, two USAID-sponsored auctions generated almost US$7 billion in investment to build 5.4 gigawatts of solar and wind energy, enough to power millions of homes – without further USAID support.

The agency’s spending on landscape conservation is less secure. That funding prevents development on sensitive natural environments like rainforests by paying nearby residents to seek livelihoods other than the logging and grazing that could unleash massive emissions from the carbon stored in the forests. If USAID collapses, that aid will dry up, jeopardizing millions of acres of climate-friendly land.

The largest portion of the USAID’s climate-related spending goes toward disaster resilience, which doesn’t attract much investment from banks and private companies, making government support crucial. In the case of Zimbabwe, for instance, the agency funds dozens of projects a year that are intended to make the country’s farmers more resilient to drought and flooding. (This is in addition to public health and AIDS relief provided to the country, which together account for the majority of its USAID funding.)

One of the largest disaster relief programs in Zimbabwe, a broad-based initiative to help smallholder farmers, has increased water stability for tens of thousands of households by helping them build small rain catchment systems and restore degraded soils. USAID has been funding the project to the tune of about $12 million annually since 2020, and the program was slated to continue for the next three years.

Zimbabwe’s minister for climate and the environment, Washington Zhakata, said that a shutoff of USAID funding will make it nearly impossible for the country to meet its commitments to the Paris Agreement. The country has promised not only to develop renewable energy, but also to spend huge amounts of money on drought and flood protections. It has developed a nationwide adaptation plan on the premise that future funding would be provided – and provided in large part by the countries that are responsible for the most carbon emissions historically, like the United States.

“With limited and reduced resources, as a result of the funding withdrawal, meeting our compliance will be an uphill task,” Zhakata told Grist. “The created finance gap will see developing countries have to live with minimum resources and also to squeeze from domestic sources.”

At times, USAID has faced criticism for inefficient spending and unclear results – including for its past climate spending. The agency’s inspector general released a report last summer that criticized USAID’s previous climate initiatives for having murky data, saying that “weaknesses in the agency’s processes for awarding funds, managing performance, and communicating climate change information could impede successful implementation.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/usaid-elon-musk-trump-climate/. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

The post Trump’s efforts to shut down USAID will have major implications for climate appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On Tuesday, after a ferocious Santa Ana windstorm blew through Southern California, a severe brush fire broke out in the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, burning 1,000 structures and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate as of Wednesday afternoon. Another large brush fire broke out near Pasadena around the same time, killing at least two people. Together the two blazes threatened some of the most valuable homes and businesses in the United States. The damage from the Palisades Fire alone could exceed US$10 billion, according to a preliminary estimate from JPMorgan. [Editor’s note: updated estimates now put the insured losses as high as US$40 billion.

If this estimate holds true, it will test insurers’ commitment to a market that has been teetering on the verge of collapse for the better part of a decade now. Over the past five years, California has become a poster child for what climate-fuelled weather disasters can do to a state’s home insurance market. Following a rash of historic wildfires in 2017 and 2018, insurance companies have fled the state, dropped tens of thousands of customers in flammable areas and raised prices by double-digit percentages.

A requirement to expand insurance coverage

Until recently, elected officials have taken few major steps to address the crisis. But late last month, after more than a year of drafting, California’s insurance commissioner unveiled a set of reforms that he claimed will bring companies back into the fold as they take effect this year.

“This is a historic moment for California,” said Ricardo Lara, the state’s insurance commissioner, when he revealed the rules in December. “With input from thousands of residents throughout California, this reform balances protecting consumers with the need to strengthen our market against climate risks.”

The rules come after months of debate among state insurance officials, lawmakers, insurance companies and consumer advocates. The biggest change is that California will now require many insurance companies to do more business in what the state calls “distressed areas,” the fire-prone scrubland and mountain regions where insurers are now hiking prices and dropping customers.

Companies will soon have to ensure that their market share in these areas is at least 85% of their total statewide market share — in other words, if a company controls 10% of the state’s insurance market, it must control at least 8.5% of the market in fire-prone areas.

This mandate should push big companies like State Farm and Allstate to pick up customers they’ve dropped in flammable regions like the mountainous north of the state. Some companies have already begun to offer new policies in burned areas in anticipation of the state’s new rules: the insurance company Mercury announced last week that it will be the first insurance company in the state to offer new policies in Paradise, California, which was destroyed in the catastrophic 2018 Camp Fire. The move recognizes the town’s work to mitigate future fires by clearing trees and hardening homes.

Expanded coverage comes with a high cost

The requirement to expand coverage, coupled with recent announcements from companies like Mercury, “should give consumers hope that competition and options will be returning,” said Amy Bach, the head of insurance customer advocacy group United Policyholders, in a statement.

In return for this added coverage, the state is making a few big tweaks that will allow insurers to pass on the price of fire risk to their customers. California is the only state in the country that doesn’t allow insurance companies to use forward-looking “catastrophe models” when they set prices. It also prohibits companies from factoring in the rising costs of reinsurance, the insurance purchased by insurance companies to ensure they’re able to pay out big claims.

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These two restrictions have kept prices artificially low for years, and also prevented insurers from planning for climate change impacts, creating a de facto subsidy for homeowners in risky areas. But these protections were removed in an attempt to coax insurers back into the market.

“This addresses the major stumbling blocks that companies have been identifying for a decade, so that’s a positive,” says Rex Frazier, the president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, the state’s leading insurance trade group.

This trade-off has some residents in fire-prone areas worried. Insurance companies might now have to offer more policies in flammable zones, but they also have more latitude to increase prices.

“I’m not optimistic that it will improve the experience of the consumer, as the insurers can now pass certain costs on to consumers, which I’m expecting will result in higher premiums,” says Jason Lloyd, who moved to mountainous Lake County last spring. He and his wife came to the area because they wanted to be closer to his wife’s family, but when they made an offer on a home, they learned that they would have to pay more than US$8,000 a year for insurance, or else go to the California FAIR Plan, a state-run insurance program that offers minimal coverage.

Lloyd and his wife later bought another home in Hidden Valley Lake, a town that has taken ambitious steps to reduce flammable vegetation, but their insurance premium is still more than $4,500 a year, more than triple what it was on their last home in Kansas. Lloyd is worried that his insurance company will hike his price further under the new rules.

Making a bargain with the insurance industry

Other states across the West such as Colorado and Oregon are also seeing insurance coverage gaps emerge after big wildfires, though their problems are less acute than those in the Golden State. In Colorado, for instance, officials just recently established a state fire-insurance backstop like California’s FAIR Plan, since it’s only in the past few years that customers there have been dropped en masse.

California’s grand bargain with the insurance industry provides a blueprint for those other states: if you want to address coverage gaps, you need to give insurers broader authority to set prices.

Even this might not be enough. The past few years have seen a reprieve from major wildfires like the ones that struck in 2017 and 2018, but this week’s blazes in the Los Angeles area could cause billions of dollars of damage, on par with an event like the Camp Fire.

Joel Laucher, a former regulator and fire insurance expert at the consumer advocacy organization United Policyholders, said that the damage from the Los Angeles blazes could lead to further price hikes and more availability gaps.

“These are going to be major losses, certainly,” he tells Grist. “Certain areas are definitely going to have new challenges, to the degree that insurers are going to be able to charge to the rate they believe those areas deserve to pay.” Laucher says that insurance companies may not decline to renew as many policies as they might have under previous state rules, but they could still avoid selling policies in some of the affected areas.

Frazier, of the insurance trade group, voices similar concerns. He says that another round of monster blazes on the scale of 2017 and 2018 could drive the insurance industry away from the state once again, despite the commissioners’ reforms.

“If we were to have a couple more unprecedented years, all bets are off,” he says.

The post The Palisades Fire is the first big test for California’s new home insurance scheme appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The measures come as a so-called heat dome sitting atop Mexico is shattering temperature records in Central America, and both Central and South America are wasting beneath a drought driven by the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which periodically brings exceptionally dry weather to the Southern Hemisphere. Droughts in the region have grown more intense thanks to warmer winter temperatures and long-term aridification fueled by climate change. The present dry spell has shriveled river systems in Mexico and Colombia and lowered water levels in the reservoirs that supply their growing cities. Officials in both cities have warned that, in June, their water systems might reach a “Day Zero” in which they fail altogether unless residents cut usage.

In warning about the potential for a Day Zero in the water system, both cities are referencing the famous example set by Cape Town, South Africa, which made global headlines in 2018 when it almost ran out of water. The city was months away from a total collapse of its reservoir system when it mounted an unprecedented public awareness campaign and rolled out strict fees on water consumption. These measures succeeded in pulling the city back from the brink.

Six years later, Cape Town stands as a success story in municipal crisis management, but experts say its playbook will be hard for Mexico City and Bogotá to replicate. Instead of focusing primarily on changing public behavior, these cities will need to make big investments to improve aging infrastructure and shore up their water supplies. How they fare in these endeavors will in turn inform future efforts to make the world’s fast-growing cities resilient to increasing climate volatility.

“The bigger question, and what’s relevant for other cities, is now that we’ve experienced this, what can we do going forward to make sure that this doesn’t happen again?” said Johanna Brühl, a water expert at the nonprofit Environment for Development in South Africa who has studied Cape Town’s water crisis.

Coining the very phrase “Day Zero” was part of Cape Town’s solution to a water crisis that many officials had seen coming for years. As reservoir levels fell between 2015 and 2017 amid a drought, city leaders released dozens of statements urging residents to reduce water usage, but no one paid much attention. Only in early 2018, when officials started talking in increasingly apocalyptic terms about a collapse of the municipal water system, did residents — and international media outlets — start to pay attention.

The city rolled out a set of measures to enforce cuts, including a tariff system that charged more thirsty users a higher price per gallon plus a door-knocking campaign to shame the biggest water hogs. But it was the rhetoric around Day Zero that seemed to be the most effective tool to slash water usage, experts who studied the crisis told Grist. When the local government warned that residents would have to pick up buckets of water from public collection points managed by the military, consumption plummeted. The effort to stave off a water crisis began to look like a grassroots movement, with residents sharing conservation tricks like flushing the toilet with water captured from the shower.

By April 2018, water usage had fallen to about half of what it was three years earlier, a decline that astonished even city officials. As consumption dropped, the city pushed the estimated date of the apocalypse out by a few days, then a few weeks. When a big rain arrived in the early summer and began to refill the reservoirs, the government turned off the countdown altogether, declaring the crisis at a temporary end.

“The big take-home point for any city in terms of navigating that kind of crisis is just to change the culture and to get the needle moving in the right direction,” said Eddie Andrews, the deputy mayor of Cape Town, who was a city council member during the Day Zero affair. “Culture is really important — making sure that you remain on message.”

Warnings of a water crisis

Political leaders in Mexico and Colombia have both been sending out the same dire warnings: One prominent Mexico City politician warned in March that the city is “at the edge of the precipice,” and last month Bogotá’s mayor announced that the city had only around 50 days of water remaining, with residents looking at “weeks and months” of water rationing.

But Cape Town’s grassroots conservation success will be difficult to replicate. In order for such messaging to work, residents have to trust their government. Indeed, other large South African cities like Johannesburg and Durban have struggled to spur usage reductions during periods of water stress, in part because they are governed by the African National Congress, or ANC. While the ANC has been the country’s dominant political party since its heroic 1994 victory over the apartheid regime that had ruled South Africa for decades, popular enthusiasm for the party has plummeted in recent years as corruption scandals have engulfed its top ranks. Unlike the governing bodies of South Africa’s other major cities, the Western Cape government that oversees Cape Town is led by an opposition party that enjoys far more local support than the ANC.

Manuel Perló Cohen, a professor who studies water infrastructure at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, said the government in Mexico City doesn’t enjoy the same kind of goodwill, meaning the government’s available tools may be limited to things like mandatory water restrictions.

“It won’t work here, because there’s a lack of confidence in the government,” he told Grist. “People don’t believe in most of what the government says, even if it’s the truth.” Mexico is just weeks away from a major election, and the incumbent leaders in Mexico City as well as the federal government have tried to downplay the water issues even as their opponents seize on it for campaign fodder.

To really have control over the future of its water, a city also needs to have control over its physical infrastructure. But Mexico City loses almost 40% of its municipal water to leakage from pipes and canals, one of the highest rates in the world. This means that residential conservation efforts can only have a limited effect on the overall water budget, according to Perló Cohen. The city has also seen a rise in water theft from canals and reservoir systems: Organized crime groups siphon off public water and use it to grow avocados or resell it to water-starved households at a high markup. Locals call this huachicoleo de agua, using a term coined to describe fuel theft.

While the city government of Bogotá has both the public trust and the political power to implement rotating water shutoffs — which has helped protect reservoir levels — the city’s conservation campaign is lacking another crucial ingredient: enthusiasm. As in Cape Town, residents shared novel ways to reduce water usage during the first week of the crisis, but since then the local media has stopped devoting as much attention to the shutoffs. Water usage has begun to tick back up.

“These types of campaigns are difficult to get across to people,” said Laura Bulbena, a Bogotá-based advocate with the environmental nonprofit World Resources Institute. “It’s rained a little in Bogotá, two weeks passed, and actually the numbers show that water consumption went up. So not only there isn’t enough reduction, there’s not enough water coming into the reservoirs.”

But there are other lessons from Cape Town’s water crisis, ones that any city could follow. In its aftermath, the city diversified its water system and reduced reliance on the main reservoirs that shrank during the drought. Officials now plan to build multiple seawater-desalination plants and recharge groundwater aquifers with treated wastewater. This will put the city on far better footing for future dry spells.

“Every single crisis presents opportunities,” said Andrews, the deputy mayor of Cape Town. “We’ve seen that you can’t just rely on the rainfall. You have to augment.”

Bogotá relies on reservoirs for almost its entire water supply, and officials had long believed that the reservoir system was resilient to drought. Now, they may change course and invest in alternate supplies. Experts say bringing in new water sources wouldn’t break the bank; the local water utility could tap the healthy underground aquifer beneath the city, and Bulbena’s team at World Resources Institute has shown that restoring a natural environment in the nearby Bogotá River could help clean that river’s water for drinking.

Every single crisis presents opportunities.

-Andrews, deputy mayor of Cape Town

“The water system is overall very good in Bogotá, but the city must invest in a backup system, because this El Niño system will probably be repeated frequently,” said Armando Sarmiento López, a professor of ecology at Javeriana University in Bogotá.

Alejandra Lopez Rodriguez, a policy advocate at the Nature Conservancy in Mexico City, said that the government of that city could also fix its severe leakage problem and build wastewater treatment plants — if officials choose to prioritize those projects.

“We have resources and we have access to financing,” she told Grist. “There are resources available. It just also takes a will and an interest to want to invest in these issues.”

The Nature Conservancy runs a water investment fund in Mexico City that has financed conservation efforts in the pine forests surrounding the metropolis; these forests capture water and help recharge the city’s collapsing groundwater aquifers.

Recharging aquifers and building desalination plants is one thing, but the water crises in these cities have also revealed a stark fact: For many of the poorest residents in a metropolis like Cape Town, clean water was never available in the first place.

The wealthy and middle-class areas of Cape Town receive piped water from reservoirs, but residents who live in the vast townships outside the city have to get water from communal standpipes — the very fate that so frightened middle-class residents of the city in the leadup to Day Zero. In the eastern neighborhoods of Mexico City, many taps have never released water for more than a few hours each day, according to Lopez Rodriguez, and much of that water is from contaminated sections of the aquifer. Lopez Rodriguez speculates that the crisis in Mexico City has drawn international attention because it has begun to affect upper-class neighborhoods that are accustomed to reliable water deliveries from the reservoir system.

Even during the peak of the Day Zero affair, many of the worst-off residents of Cape Town pointed to the same disparity, said Richard Meissner, a professor of political science at the University of South Africa who has studied the city’s response to the 2018 drought.

“I remember that some of the less affluent people in the city said that the campaign is aimed at the more affluent portions of Cape Town,” he said. “They said, ‘They don’t care about us, because for us every day is a Day Zero.’”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here. 

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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