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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones.

This week I'm talking to Rosa Lister, who's researching a book about the global water crisis with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Some of that work in progress has been published in the LRB.

First, a diary from just over a year ago, reporting from Mexico City,

and now the diary in the current issue of the paper,

an account of Rosa's recent visit to the Aswan Dam in Egypt.

Hello, Rosa, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hi, Tom, thank you for having me.

So let's begin with where I'm guessing your interest in the water crisis began in Cape Town,

where you're speaking to me from now.

And you wrote a bit about Cape Town in your Mexico City piece last year.

And in 2018, is this right, the water levels in Cape Town's reservoirs got so low

that it looked as if the city

might be going to run out of water altogether. So maybe you can begin by just talking us through

what happened then. In 2018 it was this really, really bad drought. It was, you know, it was

called this kind of once in a century drought. And the dam levels were dropping to a point where water couldn't be safely extracted.

...