Nearby, Isabel Quispe, 29, and Gabriel Jaio, 31, live with their one-year-old daughter Emy as well as a niece and her child. Together they use the water to wash clothes and dishes, bathe, and cultivate pumpkin, with plans to soon grow carrots and beetroot.
“We need the water, we couldn’t live without it,” says Jaio.
The fog catchers go some way toward addressing the grim inequalities of water supply in Peru. In Los Tres Miradores, a typical family consumes about 50 liters of water per day, according to Cruz, while the average water consumption in Lima’s richest neighborhood, San Isidro, is around 250 liters per family per day. He says that those unfortunate enough to be outside of the remit of the city’s water utility, Sedapal, have to pay 10 times more for water that is instead delivered by trucks.
Proponents believe that fog catchers have the potential to improve water supply for communities around the world amid ever-challenging circumstances. The UN, which has targeted universal access to clean water by 2030, estimates that even though water use has become nine percent more efficient, the global urban population facing water scarcity is projected to rise from 930 million in 2016 to between 1.7 and 2.4 billion in 2050.
German researcher Anne Lummerich, who has tested fog catchers for nearly 20 years, including in Lima, believes that populations will increasingly need to localize water sources. “As you see, this is the great benefit of this decentralized system,” says Lummerich. “They are cheap, easy to construct. In a world searching for water supply systems it is one important puzzle [piece] that can make an essential difference locally. It could make the difference between having water and not having water available.”
There are some issues, however. For one, fog catchers require space, which is not always easy to come by in cities, let alone urban slums. At the same time, fog catchers must be properly cleaned and maintained to stay effective. “They need maintenance and community involvement is essential,” says Lummerich. “The people need to take the responsibility to make the system sustainable.”
Most crucially, appropriate climate conditions are required. Fog isn’t everywhere.
“It’s a very intriguing idea,” says Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “But for fog catching you need areas with a lot of humidity and temperature change.”
Lund explored the idea of demisting fogs over San Francisco in the aftermath of the droughts in the Bay Area between 2012 and 2016, but concluded it would likely not be economically viable. “In some parts of the world it could be ideal,” says Lund. “But for a modern affluent community you wouldn’t want to do it.”
Yet technological advances could be quickly changing that picture. The fog catchers used by El Movimiento Peruanos sin Agua cost approximately $300 each – down from nearly triple that price a decade ago. And according to Lummerich, some new designs she is developing can collect up to 2,500 liters of water per day – about 10 times the capacity of those in Lima.
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Meanwhile, there are examples of fog catchers working in the Canary Islands and in Africa, and Cruz has already helped to install hundreds of fog catchers in other Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Chile. He says that a pilot has even recently been rolled out in Taiwan.
Back in Los Tres Miradores, rays of midday light begin to temporarily burn off Lima’s cloud cover. “We have to take fog catchers to the global level,” says Cruz, surrounded by the city’s lush, precipitous peaks. “We have shown that they work.”
All photos and videos for this story were taken by Peter Yeung.
