The average Brandenburger consumed 120.1 liters every day in 2019 – and thus for the first time a little more than the average resident of the capital, where consumption in the same year was 119.5 liters per day.
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This emerges from an unpublished report by the Berlin-Brandenburg Statistics Office, which is available in the Tagesspiegel. The RBB reported first.
The survey is carried out every three years. The increase in Brandenburg is also much clearer in comparison: it was 111.4 liters per day in 2016, while consumption in Berlin only increased by 2.3 liters over the same period. As a result, Brandenburg used more water in 2019 than it has in 25 years – almost 44,000 cubic meters per capita per year.
According to experts, the reason is likely to be the dry and hot summers. “We had a decline in water consumption for 25 years, but now you can see the climate impact: people shower more often in summer, plus there are many pools and garden irrigation,” said Karsten Rinke from the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research to RBB.
That could explain the sharp increase in Brandenburg, where more people live on garden plots.
How much water is withdrawn from the cycle by watering gardens and parks – it does not become waste water but evaporates – cannot be precisely quantified.
But the difference between normal and peak days is an indication: normal is a good 600,000 cubic meters per day, the peaks on hot summer days are close to 900,000 cubic meters.
