World now faces ‘water bankruptcy’; new global agenda to be pushed — UN report

“The central message of this report is direct: the world has entered the era of Global Water Bankruptcy.”

This is the statement of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health as it declared a global water bankruptcy as human-water systems already exceeded the sustainable limits, causing irreversible ecosystem damage.

In a report entitled “Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era,” the UN highlighted the disposition of different areas concerned with the current status of the water level on Earth.

The UN revealed that 75-percent of the world’s population still lives in countries classified as water-insecure, which means that the UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6) which aims to ensure water availability by 2023, has already failed to achieve its objective.

“Billions remain water insecure. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water insecure. Around 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and about 4 billion experience severe water scarcity for at least one month a year,” the report read.

The agency attributes the water bankruptcy to various factors such as fast-shrinking surface waters, groundwater depletion, farms over-extracting water, and intensifying global temperature, among others.

The UN also said that drought has been increasingly anthropogenic and extremely costly, with over 1.8 billion people living under drought conditions in 2022–2023, resulting in a high amount of damage.

“Drought-related damages already amount to about US$307 billion per year worldwide—larger than the annual GDP of almost three-quarters of UN Member States,” they stated.

Among these damages are the many major rivers that are failing to reach the sea and large lakes losing water faster than expected, having been said to have affected one-fourth of the global population that depends directly on water security.

Ways forward

Because the UN considers water bankruptcy as an irreversible issue, the agency now demands a deliberate combination of efforts for mitigation and adaptation to new hydrological and environmental normals.

“Rather than asking only how to avoid a future water crisis, it (the report) asks what it means to govern human–water systems on a waterbankrupt planet,” the UN stated.

“How to admit insolvency where it exists; how to manage irreversibility honestly; how to share unavoidable losses fairly; and how to design institutions, development pathways, and financial frameworks that prevent further overspending of hydrological capital and damage to the underlying natural capital,” they added.

The international agency urges governance institutions to protect water and its underlying natural capital. 

“Recognizing water bankruptcy calls for developing legal and governance institutions that can effectively protect not only water but also the hydrological cycle and natural capital that make its production possible,” the report stated.

A new global water agenda is also urgently needed, according to the UN, as existing agendas and conventional water policies are already not sufficient for the world’s current water reality.

The new agenda aims to include recognizing global water bankruptcy explicitly, developing a monitoring framework, supporting national and basin-level strategies, and using the upcoming 2026 and 2028 UN Water Conferences as areas for discussion.