What happens when you run out of water?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2019

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2025 half of the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas. This means the demand for water will be more than the supply. This is already happening in Chennai. The Indian city with more than five million people has been having a water crisis since June. The taps have run dry and experts say there’s no end in sight. Rajini Vaidyanathan has been reporting from Chennai for the BBC. She tells us what it’s like for the residents to live without water. Meera Subramanian is a journalist and author who has written about India’s climate crisis in her book, ‘A River Runs Again.’ She explains that living during a water shortage is far more common than we think.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.6	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:08.2	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:11.2	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today, what's it like to run out of water?
0:27.0	In the last couple of weeks here in the UK we've had a real flavor of the
0:37.8	extreme weather that scientists tell us that we can now see is beginning to affect so many parts of the world.
0:45.7	We had the hottest day ever recorded here and then just a week, less than that afterwards, those cold rainy days that brought flooding to parts of the country.
0:57.7	There's so much evidence that extreme weather is affecting things around the world and one of the things it's affecting is the water supply
1:05.0	water supply. So imagine if the taps actually ran dry,
1:10.0	what that would mean to your life.
1:12.0	Well, in six years, by 2025,
1:15.0	half of all of us in the world
1:17.0	could be living in places
1:19.0	where there won't always be enough water
1:21.0	for everybody who needs it.
1:22.0	The demand's just going to be too much.
1:24.8	The World Health Organization made that prediction. They call them water-stressed areas and
1:30.0	they've drawn up a list of cities at risk, which we'll get to in a bit. But first I wanted to talk to
1:36.3	Rajini Vajanath and the BBC's South Asia correspondent, because there's a city that she knows
1:41.6	really well.
1:42.6	As a kid she used to spend her holidays there
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.