World Enters Era of “Global Water Bankruptcy,” UN Report Warns

The world has entered a new and dangerous phase in its relationship with water—one defined not by temporary shortages, but by permanent loss. That is the stark conclusion of a new flagship report declaring the onset of what experts are calling “Global Water Bankruptcy.”

Speaking to reporters in New York, Kaveh Madani, Director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) and lead author of the report Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, said the planet’s water systems are no longer capable of returning to historical norms.

“What we see is a persistent failure state where water systems can no longer realistically return to their historical baselines,” Madani said. “We call this condition Global Water Bankruptcy.”

The report uses the term “bankruptcy” deliberately, Madani explained, to reflect both insolvency and irreversibility. Insolvency refers to the global pattern of withdrawing and polluting water at rates that exceed renewable inflows and safe depletion limits. Irreversibility, he said, reflects the damage already inflicted on vital water-related natural capital.

“We have damaged key parts of water-related natural capital—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, lakes, and glaciers; in ways that are not realistically reversible on human time scales, or would be prohibitively costly to restore,” Madani said.

Unlike previous warnings focused on preventing future collapse, the report presents a diagnosis of current conditions. In many river basins and regions, Madani noted, the “old normal” has already disappeared.

The scale of the crisis is vast. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population now lives in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure. More than two billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water, 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and roughly four billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month every year.

In response, the report calls for a decisive shift from crisis management to bankruptcy management, requiring a fundamentally new global water agenda.

“Tell the truth,” Madani said. “We must acknowledge irreversible losses so we can stop making development promises that hydrology cannot keep.”

Protecting what remains is now paramount, he emphasized. “We must prioritize the prevention of further damage to our remaining ‘savings’—the aquifers and ecosystems that are still functional around the world.”

The report also urges governments to rethink economic models that assume growth must be tied to ever-increasing water use. “We need to decouple growth from water,” Madani said, warning that continued expansion of withdrawals will only accelerate collapse.

Beyond environmental consequences, Madani stressed that water bankruptcy is a profound issue of justice and security. “The costs of this hydrological overshoot fall disproportionately on those who can least afford it: smallholder farmers, Indigenous communities, and the urban poor,” he said.

“If we continue to manage these failures as temporary ‘crises’ with short-term fixes,” Madani warned, “we will only deepen the ecological damage and fuel social conflict.”

The report concludes that the era of pretending water losses are reversible is over. What remains, it argues, is the urgent task of managing scarcity honestly—and equitably—before the remaining reserves are exhausted.

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