[Shit! We don’t even have the climate under control and now this. Even worse, our President has thoroughly pissed off the most water-rich nation on earth, Canada. SB SM]
Sara Hashemi January 23, 2026
https://www.smithsonianmag.com
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 water stress and climate vulnerability intersect with complex political economies. Tehran, the capital of Iran, recently came dangerously close to running out of water. “Water plays a major role in economies … because it puts people [in] jobs,” Madani tells Alec Luhn at New Scientist. “If they lose their jobs, what happens is what you see in Iran today.”
South Asia faces chronic declines in water tables because of groundwater-dependent agriculture and urbanization. Those shortages then affect agriculture, and consequently, the global food supply. “Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted or disappearing water sources,” Madani says to the Guardian’s Damian Carrington. “Water bankruptcy in India or Pakistan, for example, also means an impact on rice exports to a lot of places around the world.”
The American Southwest is another region with significant water problems. Researchers behind a 2017 study estimated that the Colorado River’s flow has dropped by about 20 percent in the 21st century compared with the average flow in the previous century. That’s causing conflict between Western states over how to manage the river’s dwindling water supply.
“The global scope of the report is useful in showing repeat patterns,” Melissa Scanlan, director of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, tells Sarah Kaplan at the Washington Post. “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,” says Scanlan, who was not involved in the U.N. report.
The report calls for global action to tackle the widespread water issue. While the current water agenda focuses on drinking water, sanitation and efficiency improvements, the U.N.’s findings suggest that these actions are no longer sufficient. Instead, the world needs to formally address the state of water bankruptcy, and elevate water issues in negotiations on climate, biodiversity and finance development, as well as in peace-building processes, per the report.
Governments will also need to prevent further damage by transforming agriculture through crop shifts and irrigation reforms and creating better water monitoring systems, the report authors argue.
This call to action “rightly centers on long-term recovery as opposed to firefighting water crises,” says Richard Allan, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England who was not involved in the report, to CNN’s Laura Paddison.
“Water bankruptcy management requires honesty, courage and political will,” Madani tells the Guardian. “We cannot rebuild vanished glaciers or reinflate acutely compacted aquifers. But we can prevent further losses and redesign institutions to live within new hydrological limits.”
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Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.
