UN Declares That the World Has Entered an Era of 'Global Water Bankruptcy'

Summary

United Nations Declares That the World Has Entered an Era of ‘Global Water Bankruptcy’ We’re living beyond our hydrological means and need to focus on long-term recovery, according to a new report More than 1.8 billion people lived under drought conditions in 2022 and 2023, according to a report from the United Nations. Daniel Garrido via Getty Images Life around the world has been feeling the effects of climate change, land degradation, deforestation, pollution and the overuse of water. Ultimately, most regions are using too much of their renewable “income” of water from rivers and snowmelt and have emptied their “savings” in groundwater and other reservoirs, ushering in an era of “global water bankruptcy,” according to a United Nations report released on January 20. “This report tells an uncomfortable truth: Many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” says Kaveh Madani, the report’s lead author and director of the U.N. University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, in a statement. He also proposes a formal scientific definition for water bankruptcy, which contrasts with the phrase “water crisis,” a term best suited for sudden, short-lived events, Madani argues. “The bitter reality for many water systems worldwide is that they are facing both insolvency and irreversibility,” he writes in a paper published January 19 in the journal Water Resources Management. Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.” Four billion people face severe water scarcity for at least one month each year, and almost 75 percent of the global population lives in water-insecure or critically water-insecure countries, according to the U.N. report. The work highlights several hotspots. In the Middle East and North Africa, high wat...