Movie star, activist and former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, will be making his way to Cape Town in May 2019, to be a keynote speaker at the W12, Future of Water Conference.
Speaking to TimesLIVE, spokesperson for the conference, Angelique Edwards, says that this is the first of these events to bring stakeholders from more than 12 international cities predicted to run out of water within the next two years.
“Cape Town is the first major city on the planet to be teetering on running out of water‚” she said. “Unfortunately‚ politicians… did not factor climate change into their resource planning and management‚ so we are behind the curve and on the back foot. It is up to all stakeholders to act and adapt so that the future of the city is preserved.”
The conference was planned to create the world’s first “major city best practice of water protocol” for a Day Zero scenario, and will be hosted in Stellenbosch. The organisation behind the event, Save Our Schools, is a host, along with the Western Cape Convention Bureau, which is a division of Wesgro.
“The conference will give us the platform to create new partnerships and facilitate possible investments into locally based businesses dealing with the water crisis and water-related technologies as we continue to build on our resilience as a province and emerge from the worst drought in over 100 years‚” said Wesgro CEO, Tim Harris.
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