Published in the Nature Sustainability journal this week, the peer-reviewed research looked at the South African city of Cape Town, which has experienced severe drought in recent years. For the study, researchers split Cape Town's urban population into five social groupings and then modeled water consumption. "Informal dwellers and lower-income households constitute together 61.5% of Cape Town's population but consume a mere 27.3% of the city's water." "Specifically, privileged water consumption is unsustainable because in the short term, it disproportionally uses the water available for the entire urban population." Longer term, the report described what it called privileged consumption as constituting an environmental threat to the status of local water sources.

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