By Tim Cocks
By Tim Cocks
GRAAFF-REINET, South Africa, Nov 29 (Reuters) – South Africa’s Karoo area has at all times been parched – it means land of thirst within the language of its earliest inhabitants, the Khoisan hunter gatherers.
But nothing ready residents of its oldest city, Graaff-Reinet, for his or her worst drought in additional than a century.
Because the dry spell entered its fourth yr, faucet water turned brown and smelled like rotting fish. When the water behind the Nqweba Dam dried up, depositing tens of 1000’s of lifeless fish onto cracked earth, queues started forming at municipal bore holes and livestock died of their tons of.
The awful decisions dealing with tens of millions of individuals in drought-stricken southern Africa – whether or not to flush bogs or not, or to maintain animals alive or allow them to die – may quickly be confronted by different locations on a warming planet with shrinking water provides.
“This space is dry however our faucets have by no means been fully empty. By no means,” mentioned…