Global water scarcity has reached a new and potentially irreversible stage, an era of “bankruptcy” driven by decades of overuse, groundwater depletion and climate change, UN experts warned on Monday.
Kaveh Madani, lead author of Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, told reporters at UN headquarters in New York that this issue matters to everyone.
“If you're 'America first', you've got to think about water, because you want to produce everything at home," Mr Madani said, referring to policies pushed by US President Donald Trump's administration. "Water is a pillar of national security."
The experts urged governments to use the UN Water Conference in Abu Dhabi in December to launch negotiations on what they said would be the world's first global framework for freshwater governance, with shared targets, regular progress reviews and financing to strengthen water management.
Groundwater is the planet's most extracted natural resource, supplying half of global domestic water use, serving as the primary source of freshwater for more than two billion people and providing about 40 per cent of irrigation supplies worldwide, according to the UN.
Mr Madani said the world had entered a new phase in which a growing number of river basins and aquifers can no longer recover to their historical conditions. Droughts, water shortages and pollution once viewed as temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many regions, he said, describing the trend as a post-crisis condition he called “water bankruptcy”.
The consequences were already visible, the experts said, with groundwater depletion, land subsidence and glacier loss causing irreversible damage in some regions while billions of people remained water insecure.
Water scarcity was no longer confined to arid countries, Mr Madani said, and severe pollution had left freshwater unusable in some regions.
“Some parts of the world have a lot of water, but the pollution level is very high, so that means that water cannot be used either, so that also means that some of those places are facing the issue of water bankruptcy,” he said.
Anthony Acciavatti, a professor at Yale University, said India accounted for about a quarter of global groundwater use.
“It consumes more groundwater than China and the United States combined. Pakistan is a distant fourth. Iran is number five,” Mr Acciavatti said.
Sofie Jaffe, permanent observer of the International Union for Conservation of Nature to the UN, said the term “water bankruptcy” underscored the absence of an international system to manage freshwater resources when they became critically depleted.
“When a company enters bankruptcy, there's a whole process that kicks in. There's a court process. The system is being put in place for how to manage the debt to make sure that people get paid, and so forth,” Ms Jaffe said.
“With water, there is no such process currently. There's no global agreement. There's no intergovernmental process on water, and no coherent architecture for countries to manage their shared water resources.”
Mr Madani also warned that rapidly growing demand from artificial intelligence was placing more pressure on already stressed water resources.
His comments come weeks after UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres launched an initiative urging technology companies to disclose the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence systems.
“As we head now to the UN Water Conference, I think we have a choice to make. We can either kind of repeat this message of crisis, but … we cannot be in a crisis forever. So we can choose tactics and solutions instead of wallowing in despair,” Ms Jaffe said.
