Amid alarming global water shortages, a UN report declares a new era of ‘water bankruptcy’, emphasising the need for urgent action and redefined policies to address irreversible losses.
United Nations water experts are calling for the formal recognition of a new era of global water “bankruptcy”, arguing that terms such as water “stress” or “crisis” no longer reflect the seriousness of the irreversible losses from the world’s declining bank of fresh water.
In a report released at the UN headquarters in New York on 20 January, academics and senior water officials said the concept of water “bankruptcy” was being presented not just as a metaphor to communicate the severity of the problem, but also to mark the beginning of concerted political action to start undoing decades of systematic overspending of surface and groundwater that have pushed water systems into failure mode.
The report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the familiar terms “water stress” and “water crisis” fail to reflect today’s reality in many places: a condition marked by irreversible losses of natural water capital and an inability to bounce back to historic baselines.
“This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” according to lead author Professor Kaveh Madani, the head of the UN University’s…