Health & Beauty
Clean water for all?
Half the world’s countries have degraded freshwater systems, UN finds.
30 August 2024
Amid chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation and pollution, all compounded by global heating, a UN report has declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy, inviting world leaders to facilitate ‘honest, science-based adaptation to a new reality.’
In ‘Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era’, scientists argue that the familiar terms ‘water stressed’ and ‘water crisis’ fail to reflect today’s reality in many places: a post-crisis 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.’
KAVEH MADANI
Lead author, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) – ‘The UN’s Think Tank on Water’
Expressed in financial terms, the report says many societies have not only overspent their annual renewable water ‘income’ from rivers, soils and snowpack, and they have depleted long-term ‘savings’ in aquifers, glaciers, wetlands and other natural reservoirs.
This has resulted in a growing list of compacted aquifers, subsided land in deltas and coastal cities, vanished lakes and wetlands and irreversibly lost biodiversity.
The UNU report is based on a peer-reviewed paper, to be published in the Journal of Water Resources Management, that formally defines water bankruptcy as persistent over-withdrawal from surface and groundwater relative to renewable inflows and safe levels of depletion, and the resulting irreversible or prohibitively costly loss of water-related natural capital.
By contrast, ‘water stress’ reflects high pressure that remains reversible, while ‘water crisis’ describes acute shocks that can be overcome.
The report was issued prior to a high-level meeting in Dakar, Senegal (26–27 Jan) to prepare the 2026 UN Water Conference, to be co-hosted by the United Arab Emirates and Senegal, 02-04 December, in the UAE.
While not every basin and country is water-bankrupt, lead author Kaveh Madani says ‘enough critical systems around the world have crossed these thresholds. These systems are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies, so the global risk landscape is now fundamentally altered.’
Madani explains that water cannot be protected if we allow the hydrological cycle, the climate and the underlying natural capital that produces water to be interrupted or damaged, but says the world has an important and still largely untapped strategic opportunity to act.
Water is an issue that crosses traditional political boundaries. It belongs to north and south, and to left and right. For that reason, it can serve as a bridge to create trust and unity between and within nations. In the fragmented world we live in, water can become a powerful focus for cooperation and for aligning national security with international priorities.
Investment in water is also investment in mitigating climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification. Water should not be treated only as a downstream sector affected by other environmental crises. On the contrary, targeted investment in water can address the immediate concerns of communities and nations while also advancing the objectives of the Rio Conventions (climate, biodiversity and desertification).
A renewed global emphasis on water could help reaccelerate stalled negotiations and potentially re-energise halted international processes. A practical and cooperative focus on water offers a way to connect urgent local needs with long-term global goals.
In the Middle East and North Africa, high water stress, climate vulnerability, low agricultural productivity, energy-intensive desalination and sand and dust storms intersect with complex political economies.
In parts of South Asia, groundwater-dependent agriculture and urbanisation have produced chronic declines in water tables and local subsidence.
In the American Southwest, the Colorado River and its reservoirs have become symbols of over-promised water.
‘Despite its warnings, the report is not a statement of hopelessness. It is a call for honesty, realism, and transformation. Declaring bankruptcy is not about giving up, it is about starting fresh. By acknowledging the reality of water bankruptcy, we can finally make the hard choices that will protect people, economies, and ecosystems. The longer we delay, the deeper the deficit grows.’
KAVEH MADANI
Lead author, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) – ‘The UN’s Think Tank on Water’
Drawing on global datasets and recent scientific evidence, the report presents a stark statistical overview of trends, the overwhelming majority caused by humans.
50% of large lakes worldwide have lost water since the early 1990s (with 25% of humanity directly dependent on those lakes).
50% of global domestic water is now derived from groundwater.
More than 40% of irrigation water is drawn from aquifers being steadily drained.
70% of major aquifers are showing long-term decline.
410 million hectares of natural wetlands – almost equal in size to the entire European Union – have been erased over the last five decades.
More than 30% of global glacier mass has been lost in several locations since 1970, with entire low- and mid-latitude mountain ranges expected to lose functional glaciers altogether within decades.
Dozens of major rivers now fail to reach the sea for parts of the year.
How long Many river basins and aquifers have been overdrawing their accounts for over 50 years.
100 million hectares of cropland have been damaged by salinisation alone.
The report also outlines the human consequences of global water bankruptcy.
75% of us live in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure.
2 billion people live on sinking ground.
4 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month every year.
170 million hectares of irrigated cropland are under high or very high water stress – equivalent to the areas of France, Spain, Germany and Italy combined.
The annual value of lost wetland ecosystem services is $5.1 trillion.
3 billion people live in areas where total water storage is declining or unstable; over 50% of global food is produced in those same stressed regions.
1.8 billion people were living under drought conditions in 2022–2023.
The current annual global cost of drought is $307 billion.
2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, while 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation.
‘Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted, or disappearing water sources. Without rapid transitions toward water-smart agriculture, water bankruptcy will spread rapidly.’
KAVEH MADANI
Lead author, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) – ‘The UN’s Think Tank on Water’
A region can be flooded one year and still be water bankrupt, Madani adds, if long-term withdrawals exceed replenishment. In that sense, water bankruptcy is not about how wet or dry a place looks, but about balance, accounting and sustainability.
As with global climate change or pandemics, a declaration of global water bankruptcy does not imply uniform impact everywhere, but that enough systems across regions and income levels have become insolvent and crossed irreversible thresholds to constitute a planetary-scale condition.
‘Water bankruptcy is also global because of its consequences for travel. Agriculture accounts for the vast majority of freshwater use, and food systems are tightly interconnected through trade and prices. When water scarcity undermines farming in one region, the effects ripple through global markets, political stability, and food security elsewhere. This makes water bankruptcy not a series of isolated local crises, but a shared global risk that demands a new type of response: bankruptcy management, not crisis management.’
KAVEH MADANI
Lead author, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) – ‘The UN’s Think Tank on Water’
The report warns that the current global water agenda – largely focused on drinking water, sanitation and incremental efficiency improvements – is no longer fit for purpose in many places.
It calls for a new global water agenda that formally recognises the state of water bankruptcy and recognises water as both a constraint and an opportunity for meeting climate, biodiversity and land commitments.
The new agenda should elevate water issues in climate, biodiversity and desertification negotiations, development finance and peacebuilding processes, and water-bankruptcy monitoring should be embedded in global frameworks using Earth observation, AI and integrated modelling.
‘Bankruptcy management requires honesty, courage, and political will. We cannot rebuild vanished glaciers or reinflate acutely compacted aquifers. But we can prevent further loss of our remaining natural capital, and redesign institutions to live within new hydrological limits.’
KAVEH MADANI
Lead author, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) – ‘The UN’s Think Tank on Water’
The report stresses that water should be used as a catalyst to accelerate cooperation between the UN Member States.
It underlines that water bankruptcy is not merely a hydrological problem, but a justice issue with deep social and political implications requiring attention at the highest levels of government and multilateral cooperation.
The burdens fall disproportionately on smallholder farmers, Indigenous peoples, low-income urban residents, women and youth, while the benefits of overuse often accrued to more powerful actors.
‘Water bankruptcy is becoming a driver of fragility, displacement and conflict. Managing it fairly – ensuring that vulnerable communities are protected and that unavoidable losses are shared equitably – is now central to maintaining peace, stability and social cohesion.’
TSHILIDZI MARWALA
UN Under-Secretary-General, Rector of UNU
Upcoming milestones – the 2026 and 2028 UN Water Conferences, the end of the Water Action Decade in 2028 and the 2030 SDG deadline, for example – provide critical opportunities to implement this shift, Madani says.
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