So Mexico City is a place of paradoxes, of conundrums, and of water that it's
there but you don't see it. There's parts of the cities
where you would never know just by looking at them that there's any water crisis around. They have clean water 24 hours a day, apparently just as abundant as it would be in New York or something like that. Then you have other parts of the city where people are living in very, very, extremely
precarious water situations. Low-income parts of Mexico City and the people that live around it are now facing a situation
where they open the tap and no water comes out. It's a very tragic story of having all of the water in the
world and somehow ending up being a city that today is on the list of top 10 cities most
likely to run out of water. You have to do something, and so we do. Enrique Lomnitz' hometown, Mexico City, is in a water crisis that
gets worse by the day. He started social enterprise Isla Urbana to stem the tide. They design and build
cheap and simple systems that catch and clean rainwater. There's nothing new about
rainwater harvesting. People have been harvesting rainwater since they first opened their mouths and looked up at the sky at the same time. It seemed to us like a logical thing. Just figure out how we can use this water that we have available to us as kind of like a first
part of a larger solution. It's a situation that affects
women very particularly. Mostly it's women who tend to be more kind of in charge of
managing the household and basically their lives start circling around these water issues. Elizabeth is one of 11 people living in this house on
the edge of Mexico City. She's also one of 2.5 million people who don't have access to
permanent and safe drinking water. But going thirsty isn't where Elizabeth and her family's problems end. The economic implications
of not having water are very interesting,
and the people that rely on water trucks, for example, they often have to have somebody at home all the time to wait for a
possible water truck arrival so there's often someone
that can't work at all. They just need to always be at home. What's strange about Mexico City, though, is it isn't some barren desert. It's wet. Really wet. Here we'll have one hour where it's like apocalyptic. The sky is just falling and
there's lighting and thunder and rivers in the streets. During the rainy season
you will have floods. Those floods can last for days. Mexico City gets considerably more rain than a city like London does, for example. The question that comes to one's mind is if we have so much water resources, why do we have to be in
such a bad situation? The water crisis in Mexico
City is a 400-year-old story. Mexico City started off
being a city on an island in the center of a lake in this basin high up in the mountains. And over the course of 400 years, basically the city has focused on draining all of these ancient
lakes out of the aquifer and building a giant
modern city in its place. So where you had this
2,000-square-kilometer lake you now have just city as
far as the eye can see. You see a lot of highways
and a lot of avenues and streets who have the name of rivers. Those streets were actually
rivers 50, 60 years ago. To provide for its vast population around 1,800 wells pump
water out of the ground, depleting the aquifer below. But because the city's
prone to deadly flooding it's built a massive infrastructure to get the water out
quickly when it rains. The result: not enough water filters down to recharge the aquifer. The loss of that water
that you can actually see is paralleled with the drying
up of all of the aquifers. We're just pumping and
pumping and pumping water out of the ground to the
degree that, actually, Mexico City is physically sinking. More than 10 meters in the last century. Monuments need steps added
for people to reach them, streets rise and fall,
sinkholes open up the earth, and the water from the ground isn't enough to quench the city's thirst. 30% of its water is imported
from outside the city. But the infrastructure is so old and huge not only is 40% of water
lost through leaks, but much of what does make
it can become contaminated. Many people end up spending
a significant portion of their income on
expensive bottled water. People don't trust the
quality of the water they get out of the grid even in areas where it's actually quite good. 98 or so percent of the population
doesn't drink tap water. They buy water from purifiers,
from these filter stores that will fill your five-gallon jugs. We're industrial designers, and honestly, we were looking for problems to solve. People just started
telling us about water. They started telling us about how their water situation was
getting worse and worse. Isla Urbana installed their first system here in Ajusco on the
southern edge of the city. It didn't take long for people
to realize the benefits. Little by little almost
all of the neighbors have started harvesting
rainwater themselves. We're working with communities so that they can become self-reliant in getting their own water supply and securing their own water. It needs to be as simple as possible. Rain falls on the roof,
goes through the gutters, goes through the pipe,
diverts the first volume, goes into a tank, gets chlorinated, you let the little bits of dust settle and then you pump that water out and give it just some simple filtration. That water you can just connect directly into your house's existing plumbing system so you open a tap in the kitchen and that's the rainwater
that's coming out. For families in these areas that are very, very water-stressed,
starting to harvest rainwater can mean sometimes doubling
the amount of water that you actually have available. 95% or so of the water
that's used in a household is not for drinking,
it's for everything else, and so that's really
where you wanna hit first 'cause that's where you're gonna make the biggest first difference. So we want to have our baseline system be as affordable as possible,
but designed in such a way that you can add new
treatment systems to it so that you can eventually stop having to buy drinking water as well. The water, it's water,
except it's just water that's reaching your house via
falling on you from the sky instead of coming from
the city's water grid. We get usually between
700 and 1,000 liters of water per year for
every square meter of roof. So if you have a house that has, say, a 100-square-meter roof,
it's not a huge house at all, a house like that can get up to around 100,000 liters of water per year. The problem at that point becomes they just don't have enough
tanks to store it all. Mexico City should be able to get at least 20 to 30% of its water demand through rainwater harvesting systems, which is very significant. It's an incredible amount of water. Guaranteeing water goes way beyond quenching thirst and saving money. It could also save a city from itself. You have health, economic, social, political problems. If you divide the amount of water that gets into the network every second, every inhabitant of Mexico City should get 350 liters per day. If the entire eastern part of Mexico City runs out of water there's gonna be incredible amounts of social friction and discontent and political crises. We all live in this valley.
We all need to be okay. The local government has recognized the perilous position
the city finds itself in and last year invested in
10,000 of Isla Urbana's systems. They plan to install 100,000 by 2024. Many believe regenerating areas of nature holds the key to protecting cities from problems like water sustainability. We're not going to be able to return to the Aztec city in
the middle of the lake. That's gone. But we can have a new
water model for the city. A model where we keep
water, we have rivers, we have small lakes, and water
can be a friend and an ally and not a foe like it's today. When it comes to running out of water, Mexico City isn't alone. L.A., Cape Town, Sao
Paulo, the list is growing, each with millions of inhabitants facing devastating water crises. They're serving as a warning as more of the world's population
migrates to urban centers. Mexico City in 1940 had maybe a 1.5 million inhabitants and today has close to 23 million people. And this incredibly violent growth and all this incredibly
fast expansion of the city has put unbelievable stress
on all of the natural systems that provide us with things like water. Since 2009 Isla Urbana have installed more than 20,000 of
their harvesting systems, mostly on top of low-income
homes in Mexico City and in rural communities. Their devices catch a combined
800 million liters of water each year, providing some 120,000 people with a significant portion
of their water needs. I believe a lot in the empowerment aspect of this. How do we transition to being a society where everybody is actively participating in water management and
is actually harvesting their own water and taking care of it and not relying on this other system?
La Ciudad de México no sobrevivirá al siguiente siglo si no replantea su relación inseparable con su entorno. Porque, a la postre, la ciudad no sólo sufre una evidente carencia de agua (las fugas en el sistema del SACMEX son del orden del 40% al 50%) sino también se inunda y se seguirá inundando.