The world has entered a new era of ‘water bankruptcy,’ U.N. report says

Researchers say this is not merely a temporary crisis, but a permanent failure that requires rethinking the world’s approach to water scarcity.

Iran’s Lake Urmia, once the largest lake in the Middle East, has dramatically shrunk due to prolonged drought, the damming of rivers feeding the lake, and extensive groundwater extraction in the surrounding area. (MORTEZA AMINOROAYAYI/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

By Sarah Kaplan

Climate change, pollution and decades of overuse have pushed the world into a state of “water bankruptcy,” leaving essential sources of fresh water irreparably damaged and billions of people without enough water to meet their basic needs, United Nations experts declared on Tuesday.

In a sweeping report from United Nations University (UNU), the international agency’s research arm, scientists compared humanity to a person plunging into financial ruin. Not only does the world overspend its annual water “income” — the renewable flows that come from rain and snow — but it has also exhausted the long-term “savings” stored in underground aquifers, glaciers and ecosystems. At the same time, people are allowing pollution from human waste, agriculture and industrial operations to contaminate the dwindling fresh water that remains — like someone setting fire to the last few dollars in their wallet.

Signs of this emergency are alarming and abundant, said lead author Kaveh Madani, director of the UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health. More than half of the world’s large lakes are shrinking. Roughly 70 percent of underground aquifers are in long-term decline. Large-scale droughts have become more frequent and pervasive, costing an average of $307 billion annually. Some 4.4 billion people face water scarcity for at least one month a year.

Madani and his colleagues argue that it’s not sufficient to refer to the situation as “water stress” or a “water crisis” — language often used by the U.N. and other international institutions — because the challenge will not go away anytime soon.

Human activities have already caused irreversible damage to many of the systems that generate, regulate and store fresh water, the report says. Rising temperatures, driven mostly by the burning of fossil fuels, have altered precipitation patterns and increased the rate of evaporation from landscapes. Deforestation and development have destroyed the ecosystems that filter and clean rainwater. Overextraction is causing the collapse of subterranean aquifers that store groundwater, reducing their capacity to become recharged. And melting mountain glaciers, which accumulated over centuries or millennia, will not grow back in a human lifetime.

“What appears on the surface as a crisis is, in fact, a new baseline,” the report authors write. “Some losses are now unavoidable, and the central task is to prevent further irreversible damage while reorganizing the system around a smaller hydrological budget.”

Existing policies are too narrowly focused on improving sanitation and drinking water and helping industries to become incrementally more efficient, the report says. Ahead of an upcoming United Nations water conference in the United Arab Emirates, it calls on leaders to declare a “global water bankruptcy” and adopt a new approach to managing the world’s dwindling supply of safe water. Otherwise, it warns, the world will slide deeper into a future of food shortages, disease outbreaks and water-fueled conflict.Ask The Post AIDive deeper

Madani, who was born in Tehran, became convinced of the need for a new approach to water management after watching a decades-old black-and-white video about shortages in the Iranian capital. The narrator referred to the situation as a “crisis” — the same language being used now to describe the multiyear drought that has threatened Tehran’s water supply and prompted President Masoud Pezeshkian to contemplate evacuating the city.

“How long can we call something like this crisis?” Madani said. “A crisis means a shock — it’s an anomaly that must be addressed urgently, but still you have hopes that the baseline can be restored.”

“I think it’s a big lie if you’re communicating to the public that this is a temporary situation,” he added. What Iran — and the world — are truly facing is “a postcrisis situation of failure.”

The water shortages in Iran — which experts have linked to human-caused climate change as well as surging demand and mismanagement of limited resources — have led to rationing, power cuts and increased food prices. The economic strain helped fuel the mass protest movement currently gripping the country, which in turn has prompted a brutal crackdown by government forces.

These issues increasingly affect countries of all sizes and income levels, said Melissa Scanlan, an environmental law expert and director of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who did not contribute to the report.

Major urban areas — from Cape Town, South Africa to Chennai, India to Mexico City — have teetered on the brink of “day zero” events, when water supplies fall so low that millions of people’s taps run dry. Pervasive droughts have caused spikes in the prices of foods such as Mediterranean olive oil and California vegetables, while saltwater contamination from rising seas has caused billions of dollars in damage to rice paddies and fruit farms in Vietnam. Large hydropower dams from Zambia to Nevada have seen reservoir levels fall so low they lose their ability to produce electricity. And some places have pumped so much water from their aquifers that their land is sinking — damaging infrastructure and making these areas more vulnerable to floods.Ask The Post AIDive deeper

“The global scope of the report is useful in showing repeat patterns,” Scanlan said. “It’s not just the Southern Hemisphere, it’s not just the Middle East. There is something larger at play in terms of how we’re treating water across the world.”

The report also shows how water problems are already wreaking economic and political havoc. Western U.S. states are locked in a years-long battle over the dwindling Colorado River. Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia are at odds over a massive new dam on a major tributary of the Nile. Research shows that undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States increases amid warming-fueled droughts.

“Lack of water means lack of food,” Madani said. “It means famine, unemployment, chaos, revolution.”

A lot of this geopolitical turmoil comes down to what Madani calls a “mismatch between water availability and water consumption.” The laws, contracts and treaties that govern water use — such as the century-old compact determining allocation of the Colorado River — were based on a climate that no longer exists, she said. Farmers, cities and industrial water users trade blame over who is taking more than their fair share, without acknowledging that the overall pie has shrunk. Typical measures to address shortfalls, such as drilling deeper wells or diverting more water from rivers, can end up making the problem worse.

Much the way a company filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy must restructure operations, renegotiate contracts and create a new plan to pay debts, the world should reassess how much water is actually available and prioritize among competing claims, the U.N. report says. In some cases, that might involve limiting new development in water-stressed cities or restricting the growth of water-intensive industries. World leaders must also protect the forests, wetlands and other ecosystems that pay a crucial role in Earth’s water cycle.

The biggest challenges — and the biggest opportunity for change — lie in the agriculture sector, which accounts for 70 percent of humanity’s water usage, said Rabi Mohtar, a hydrologist who leads the Water-Energy-Food Nexus Research Group at Texas A&M University.

Governments may need to impose restrictions on irrigation and groundwater pumping or require farmers to shift to less-thirsty crops, he said. They should also implement regulations to prevent pesticides, fertilizers and other forms of agricultural runoff from polluting the shrinking water supply.

Mohtar, who was not involved in the U.N. report, expressed skepticism about the rhetorical value of declaring “water bankruptcy.” He worried that the terminology might discourage people from taking action, because it sends the message that humanity has already failed.

But he agreed with the basic premise that people have drastically exceeded the planet’s capacity to produce clean, fresh water.

“The time when we have abundance is over,” Mohtar said. “I would like to see accountability to every single drop.”

Rethinking the world’s approach to managing water will have far-reaching economic and social consequences, the U.N. report acknowledges. Arid nations might need to import food rather than trying to grow it themselves. Farmers in areas that can no longer support agriculture may need to pursue other livelihoods. If changes aren’t implemented in a manner that is equitable and inclusive, the report said, the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people will inevitably suffer the most.

Yet Madani emphasized that addressing the world’s water challenges will yield “co-benefits” in other areas. Restoring wetlands can help reduce dust storms, improving air quality and public health. Techniques to boost farmland’s ability to retain water also helps the soils absorb more carbon.

“In a fragmented world, water might be an excuse for bringing people together,” he said.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/01/20/global-water-bankruptcy/?