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drinking water
How Do We Manage a World in Water Bankruptcy?
According to the UN, the world has moved beyond water crisis into systemic, chronic scarcity threatening public health, economies, and ecosystems while making global cooperation increasingly existential.
Jan 22, 2026
According to a major new report from the United Nations University, global water systems are no longer in crisis, but have entered a state of chronic failure, with shortages that extend far beyond temporary shocks or short-term recovery.
Released on January 20 by the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era concludes that the planet has entered the era of global water bankruptcy. This indicates that long-term water use now exceeds renewable inflows, leaving much of Earth’s natural systems damaged beyond realistic repair. In other words, societies have already exhausted or polluted the natural buffers—rivers, aquifers, wetlands, and glaciers—that once sustained them. Droughts, shortages, and pollution events are increasingly becoming persistent features of daily life. In this post-crisis condition, the authors argue, it is best not to describe the situation as a crisis at all, but as water bankruptcy.
At the press conference set to release the report, Kaveh Madani, lead author and director of the UNU-INWEH, emphasized that this is not a semantic shift, but a clear warning that the dominant way governments, markets, and international institutions think about water is no longer fit for reality.
“For decades, scientists, the media, and policymakers have warned about a global water crisis… what we document in this report is a different reality emerging in many places: a persistent failure state in which water systems can no longer realistically return to their historical baselines,” Madani said.
Applied to water, bankruptcy management requires confronting overuse, acknowledging irreversible losses, and aligning development goals with hydrological limits.
The report does not claim that the entire planet is bankrupt. Water bankruptcy is assessed basin by basin and aquifer by aquifer. However, as regions across the globe simultaneously overdraw water and erode the natural systems that sustain it, the world faces a fundamentally altered risk landscape, with cascading threats to food security, agricultural markets, rural livelihoods, and climate feedbacks.
What distinguishes water bankruptcy from familiar narratives of scarcity is the scale of irreversibility. According to the report, societies have not only overdrawn annual renewable water flows, but have also liquidated long-term savings stored in groundwater, wetlands, glaciers, soils, and river ecosystems.
Over the past five decades, the world has lost approximately 410 million hectares of natural wetlands—almost the land area of the European Union—resulting in the disappearance of vital ecosystem services such as flood control, water purification, and habitat provision, valued at more than US$5 trillion. Groundwater depletion is even more consequential. According to the analysis, around 70% of the world’s major aquifers show long-term declining trends. Excessive pumping has already caused land subsidence across nearly 5% of the global land area, including dense urban zones that are home to close to 2 billion people. In some regions, land is sinking by up to 25 centimeters per year, permanently reducing storage capacity and increasing flood risk. These damages are not easily undone. Compacted aquifers, subsided deltas, dried-up lakes, and extinct species represent long-term, irretrievable losses.
As Kaveh Madani emphasizes, “This is not another warning about a future we might still avoid everywhere… It is a diagnosis of a world where, in many basins, the old normal is already gone.”
The current human cost and future risks of water bankruptcy are also staggering. According to the report, nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water insecure or critically water insecure. About 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and roughly 4 billion experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year. The risks are compounded given more than half of global food output is located in regions where total water storage (including surface water, soil moisture, snow, ice, and groundwater) is already declining or unstable.
The report’s crux is that the global water agenda remains stuck in a crisis-response mindset that is no longer fit for purpose. Such alarming figures are partly the result of governments, utilities, and basin authorities continuing to treat chronic overshoot as a temporary emergency. Short-term emergency measures, supply expansion, and incremental efficiency gains dominate policy discussions, even as underlying water balances continue to deteriorate. Ultimately, this only deepens ecological damage and entrenches unsustainable water-use practices.
Madani was clear at the press conference: “Expecting a wicked problem of this scale to have a simple solution is as naïve as the reductionist solutions that helped get us into the current state,” he said.
Instead, the United Nations University calls for a shift to what it terms bankruptcy management, a concept borrowed deliberately from finance. Applied to water, bankruptcy management requires confronting overuse, acknowledging irreversible losses, and aligning development goals with hydrological limits. It also demands protecting remaining aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, lakes, and glaciers, rather than treating these life-sustaining systems as expendable capital to prop up unsustainable growth.
The report itself also highlights the social and political dimensions of water bankruptcy, stressing that it is not solely an environmental issue. The costs of hydrological overshoot fall hardest on those least responsible and least able to adapt: smallholder farmers, Indigenous communities, and the urban poor. The authors caution that demand reduction is not politically feasible if treated as a purely technical exercise, noting that abruptly cutting water access for farmers could trigger unemployment, social unrest, and broader instability. Effective management, they argue, must be paired with political and economic transitions that protect livelihoods, provide compensation and risk support, enable shifts in crops and practices, and help economies decouple jobs and growth from ever-rising water use.
Despite their sober diagnosis, the authors do not end in resignation, arguing that water could—and existentially must—still serve as a unifying axis in an increasingly fragmented world. Given water intersects climate, biodiversity, food systems, public health, land use, and political stability, it remains one of the few domains where coordination is both necessary and unavoidable.
“Investing in water is an investment in delivering on all of those [aforementioned] agendas,” said Madani, at the report’s launch. “And in rebuilding cooperation in a fragmented world.”
Similarly, authors stress the importance of upcoming political milestones: the UN Water Conferences in 2026 and 2028, the conclusion of the Water Action Decade, and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals deadline. They argue these moments offer a rare window to reset the global water agenda to move beyond incremental efficiency gains and emergency responses toward explicit recognition that many river basins and aquifers have already crossed thresholds where historical conditions cannot be restored.
Yet translating this clarity into action faces stark political and institutional realities. The UN system, tasked with leading such a reset, remains mired in member states cutting funding, worsening geopolitical polarization and international conflict, and key bodies—including the Security Council—grossly failing to uphold the UN Charter’s basic human rights mandates. In practice, declarations and frameworks proliferate, deadlines are extended, but meaningful, coordinated action remains slow, uneven, or hollow. Water may be uniquely cross cutting, yet it is not immune to these structural constraints or the apparent erosion of accountability. Crucially, it also requires that primarily Western, early-industrial economies reckon with histories of inequitable use and extraction that have both driven water shortages and contributed to the persistent inequities of scarcity today.
As with other pressing global crises, the consequences of water bankruptcy may unfold faster than governments and institutions can respond, but the authors argue that naming the problem clearly could galvanize civil society and decision-makers into meaningful action before it’s too late.
“Our message is not despair,” Madani concluded. “It’s clarity. The earlier we face the real balance sheet, the more options we still have.”
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Has Sen Schumer Learned Costly Lessons in the Federal Spending Fight?
With very few opportunities for the minority party to make a difference, Schumer and Senate Democrats now must hold strong to stand up for everyday Americans and their access to the most basic essentials.
Sep 26, 2025
In March, Food & Water Watch joined a chorus of organizations calling on New York Sen. Chuck Schumer to step aside as Democratic minority leader after his disastrous capitulation during the last federal appropriations fight. At the time, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were running rampant, defunding and destroying critical climate, food, and water programs. But instead of fighting to mitigate the harms, Schumer led fellow Senate Democrats in ceding any leverage they had by capitulating to Republicans’ six-month spending bill without demanding any concessions or procedural backstops.
Now the opportunity has returned to leverage the significant power Senate Democrats have ahead of the latest spending deadline. For the moment it seems that Schumer has learned some lessons from the earlier debacle. He led his caucus to reject a House spending proposal and support an alternative plan to protect critical food, water, and health programs from Trump’s dangerous cuts. He must continue to demonstrate this leadership as the September 30 spending deadline draws near.
Trump and congressional Republicans are playing a dangerous game of chicken, running headfirst into a government shutdown on October 1 with no off-ramp. Trump has refused to even meet with Democratic leadership, and House Republicans are refusing to come back to work until after the funding deadline. They are following the same playbook they used in March to force the hands of Schumer and Senate Democrats. It worked then, and it will work again if Schumer doesn’t stand strong.
After all, the stakes couldn’t be higher: Access to safe, affordable food, clean water, basic healthcare, and so much more.
A Democratic counter proposal from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) includes a key protection against partisan rescissions. We are encouraged that Schumer claims to support this plan.
Though congressional Republicans tout their spending bill as a “clean” extension of current funding levels, this commitment is belied by their threatened use of partisan rescissions to enact Trump’s dangerous cuts later on. This backdoor process fast-tracks the elimination of previously agreed upon funding. While the spending bill needs the support of Senate Democrats to reach the 60-vote threshold to avoid the filibuster, with partisan rescissions Trump can later send Congress a list of programs to eliminate through a simple majority vote—without requiring any Democratic support.
Case in point: Congressional Republicans slashed funding for public television and radio—long an aim of the right—through this partisan rescission process earlier in the year. Trump has further abused this tool to illegally withhold funding through a so-called “pocket rescission,” issuing a last-minute request to freeze funds, run out the clock on the fiscal year, and unilaterally cut congressionally-approved funds. This is unconstitutional.
Further backdoor cuts threaten everything from the environment to education to healthcare. On clean water specifically, Trump and congressional Republicans have proposed slashing funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets limits on contaminants in water, develops methods to test for and removes toxic substances, and establishes regulations that prevent water pollution in the first place. Slashing the EPA will imperil the ability of regulators to enforce clean water standards, making our water less safe and Americans more sick.
Republicans have also proposed slashing funding for water infrastructure. In fact, Trump’s spending proposal calls for virtually eliminating funding for the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds—the primary source of federal funding for water infrastructure in the country. Our water infrastructure is already dramatically underfunded. Federal cuts will make it even more difficult for municipalities to respond to acute threats to water safety, including toxic PFAS “forever chemicals,” lead, and climate change-induced storms and flooding. The result will be higher water bills for households and business, and dirtier, dangerous water.
Senate Democrats must reject the House spending bill for these and many other reasons. Fortunately, a Democratic counter proposal from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) includes a key protection against partisan rescissions. We are encouraged that Schumer claims to support this plan.
Recently we facilitated a letter from more than 200 groups across the country that was sent to Sen. Schumer, demanding just this. The letter was signed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Oxfam America, Popular Democracy, and Public Citizen, among many others. It seems that Sen. Schumer is finally listening.
With very few opportunities for the minority party to make a difference, Schumer and Senate Democrats now must hold strong to stand up for everyday Americans and their access to the most basic essentials, including clean water. No budget deal that allows for future partisan rescissions can be allowed to pass.
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Rain Barrels at the End of the World
I can’t keep Donald Trump from building up ICE as a paramilitary goon squad or stop the polar ice caps from melting, but I can do my best not to use too much water.
Sep 24, 2025
The truck wheel’s inner tube was right in front of me, no longer half-submerged in the pond’s late summer muck. After so many hot weeks without rain, the water had dried up and the garbage was completely exposed.
My feet barely sank into the mud as I pulled the inner tube free. It was heavier than I expected, full of leftover pond water. I tipped it to drain the water, so I could carry it away. But that water just kept dribbling out.
It was dark and smelled of rotten leaves. As I shook the tube, I tried to keep the muck from getting on my shoes. There must have been 3 or 4 gallons of it. Contorted in an uncomfortable crouch and harassed by bugs as the water glugged slowly out of the little hole, I felt impatient. I was ready to share my grubby prize with my friends, but the hole was so small and I was still far from the road. So, I waited, watching the water continue to trickle out.
But I couldn’t just wait. Instead, my mind drifted to catastrophe, and I began imagining a near future where I could no longer take water for granted. Such a thought was in my head not just because I’m prone to binge on dystopian novels but because I read the newspaper and watch the TV news at night. So, there I was, crouching at the no-longer-pond’s edge, cradling that huge inner tube, and wondering how long it would be in our overheating future before the dark, fetid water I was pouring onto the ground would seem like a precious resource for my family and me. Extended drought? The collapse of our water infrastructure? War? None of those nightmare scenarios is remote enough anymore that I can simply dismiss them as figments of my overactive imagination.
There is no longer any human right to water in Gaza or parts of the West Bank either.
Meanwhile, I continued to think about that gross water. How would I clean it if I needed to? I recalled my survival-skills training between 8th and 9th grade and decided I would first have to filter it, then boil it, and finally treat it with iodine. And no, it wouldn’t be delicious or refreshing, but it probably wouldn’t kill us either. Then I thought about how it might have been inside that inner tube for years and realized that life would have to be brutish indeed before I considered such a last resort water source.
Is our water infrastructure here in New London, Connecticut, old? It sure is. Sometimes there are even black flecks in the water that pours out of our faucets. But no worries now. After all, I had a big bottle of fleckless water in my backpack, and I certainly wouldn’t need to drink that ancient inner-tube pond water. Not today, anyway.
Better yet, rain was forecast for later in the weekend! And so, the moment passed—but not completely because I suddenly remembered some water I drank 30 years ago that had been boiled over a wood fire in a small town in Guatemala when I was part of a peace delegation there. All these years later, my tongue could still feel the eerie dryness, the woodiness of that water, and suddenly I wondered whether that feeling would be in my future, too.
Water Wars—For Real
The kids in New London had gathered in this park just a few weeks earlier for “Water Wars,” a beloved community institution where, on a hot summer morning, kids and grown-ups arm themselves with water guns and soak one another. That day, there was also a dunk tank, a deejay, and dozens of people running around with big, brightly colored Super Soakers.
In truth, I’ve never liked the event, perhaps because I’m a grumpy old person who just doesn’t care for guns of any sort, even play ones. And now, contemplating the future loss of water and the violence that could come with it, those Water Wars suddenly seemed like fin de siècle madness to me. As I—excuse the image—immerse myself ever more deeply in the current and impending water crises, I find myself increasingly troubled by the very real water wars to come.
The Pacific Institute, which has tracked water-related conflicts for three decades, never counted more of them than the 347 in 2023 (the last year for which it had complete data). Its report distinguished between water as a trigger for war, a weapon of war, and a casualty of war. In Burkina Faso, Mexico, Ukraine, and elsewhere globally, civilians now all too often find themselves going without water, as its sources and treatment facilities are destroyed, while groups fight over who controls what water remains.
Dr. Peter Gleick, cofounder of the Pacific Institute, wrote The Third Age of Water in which he argues that everyone deserves the “human right to water.” And at this moment, nowhere on Earth is water more a cause for and casualty of war than in Palestine. As he notes, that is “partly a reflection on the scarcity of water in the region. It’s partly a reflection on disputes over control of land in the West Bank. And it’s partly a reflection of the massive destruction of Gaza after the Hamas attack in October, where infrastructure of all kinds has been targeted—civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, water systems, energy systems. It’s a reflection of the broad violence in the region.” In short, there is no longer any human right to water in Gaza or parts of the West Bank either.
And believe it or not, even as such realities came to my mind, the water was still dribbling out of that inner tube, while my arms hurt ever more from holding it up. Still, when I placed my minuscule discomfort alongside that of all those people in Gaza, waiting in vain for both water and food in a manmade famine of genocidal proportions, I felt ashamed.
All Wars Are Resource Wars
Even before the complete leveling of all infrastructure there in an almost two-year massive bombardment, the lives of Palestinians were violently controlled and curtailed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). An IDF Military Order had long forbidden Palestinians from building any new water installations without a permit from the Israeli army. Since that order was issued in 1967, almost no one has gotten such a permit. So, Palestinians weren’t able to drill new water wells, install pumps, or even deepen existing wells. And now, many of them don’t have access to fresh water springs at all and are cut off from the Jordan River.
In a Big Brother twist that boggles the mind, they aren’t even allowed to collect rainwater in cisterns. As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed in his book The Message, “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.” And if anyone is still on the fence about that one-sided war of dominion, such a piece of information should knock you to the side of the suffering, starving, thirsty, dying Palestinians.
Of course, on some level, all wars are resource wars. Military scholar Michael Klare made exactly that point as early as 2001. For nearly two years, Israel has used Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023 attack on civilian and military targets as its excuse to destroy as much of Gaza as possible—mission (almost) complete. US President Donald Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” fever dream of Gaza as a casino-state built to Atlantic City levels of gaudiness might never be realized, but Israel’s long game certainly includes complete control over Palestinian natural resources, including oil and gas. Americans are propagandized to think of the “poor Palestinians” (if we think of them at all), even though Palestine is rich in natural resources.
Trump Doesn’t Drink Water
The rumor is that Donald Trump drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day (the best argument against “Just for the Taste of It” I’ve ever heard). His aversion to drinking water is well known; and his antipathy toward the basic building blocks of life seems to come right out of a Mad Max movie, but it’s consistent with his administration’s assault on the water system infrastructure in the United States.
The 2024 Report Card of the American Society of Civil Engineers gives our water infrastructure a C-. Worse yet, they project a $309 billion chasm in funding between the drinking-water-infrastructure needs of this country and what the federal government is allocating in investments. And that chasm is expected to grow into a gulf of $620 billion by 2043. In short, we’re losing the equivalent of 50 million Olympic-sized swimming pools of water through leaks and cracks every year, more than enough to meet the needs of the 2.2 million Americans who don’t have running water or basic indoor plumbing, according to Dig Deep, a water access organization. That’s one hell of a lot of people in the richest nation on Earth, even if not that many in a population of 340 million.
While you might imagine that it’s just back-to-the-landers and old white hippies who like to chop wood and haul water, more than 44 million of us are served by inadequate water systems that recently had Safe Drinking Water Act violations—one of every seven Americans. My black-flecked water might be among that number.
President Trump, of course, is hardly bending over backwards to address such a gulf in water access. For him, undoubtedly, the problem doesn’t even register, not like railing against apocalyptic city hellscapes, deputizing brutes to muscle immigrants out of the country, or selectively mourning some victims of gun violence and not others.
Rain Barrel Resistance
I collect rainwater in three big olive barrels with spigots drilled into the bottom and mesh stretched over the top to try to keep mosquitoes from setting up residence there. Earlier this year, I even bought a dozen goldfish after the Internet assured me they would eat mosquito larvae. I freed them into those barrels and encouraged my kids to name them. Within a week, unfortunately, they turned up dead at the top of the barrels.
I use the water to keep my weedy garden alive and give it to my chickens (assumedly with tasty mosquito larvae for extra protein). I got the rain barrels after reading that unchlorinated, untreated rainwater is better for plants. In light of everything, can I now see those barrels as an act of resistance on this distinctly overheating planet of ours? How long before someone tries to regulate rainwater collection? How long before the tech bros figure out a way to put a price tag on what falls from the sky? (That’s anything but far-fetched if you consider how everything else is being privatized.)
How long can I depend on the relatively clean water from my tap? It flows in a big underground pipe from a reservoir less than 10 miles from my home and is filtered by my local water company. That system has provided New London, a town established in the 1600s, with water for a good long time, but will it keep doing so for the foreseeable, ever hotter future? In fact, is there a foreseeable future?
Which will get us first? Forest fires or fascism? Misogyny or microplastics? Global warming or the paramilitary-ICE take over?
Sometimes, I pay my water bill in person. I asked once if there was anything I could do to be more efficient and steward my water resources better. The woman behind the counter looked at my bill and then said, “For a single person, you’re doing pretty good.”
“Oh,” I replied, “I’m actually a family of five.” (I wondered then if I looked like a single lady or if she was just basing her statement on my water consumption.)
“What!?” she exclaimed and added, “You are not a very good water customer then. You should get a pool or wash your car more or something!”
I realized that she was joking and we laughed together. Then, she commended me on my family’s good water savings.
And it’s true that here in the Northeast, I might still be able to lull myself into complacency. It’s raining, in fact, as I write this. But I can’t act so naively when we’re clearly heading off a weather cliff. A recent headline in my local newspaper still haunts me. “Scientists tap ‘secret’ fresh water under the ocean, raising hopes for a thirsty world.” What could go wrong? After all, there’s evidently a vast freshwater aquifer beneath the ocean floor off the eastern coast of the United States and, amid a massive and growing water crisis, the world needs water. However, Woods Hole geophysicist Rob Evans offers caution: “If we were to go out and start pumping these waters, there would almost certainly be unforeseen consequences.”
Will that aquifer and others like it become the United States’ strategic reserves, alongside oil reserves and the nuclear weapons we keep in “reserve” to protect our wealth? Might countries like ours someday go to war to defend any edge they might have in dwindling water reserves? Trump’s saber-rattling at our neighbor to the north was at least partially water related, wasn’t it? In his usual fantasy-filled fashion, he imagined a “large faucet” directing Canadian water to California’s needy orchards and fields.
Preparing for—Responding to—All the Bads
Which will get us first? Forest fires or fascism? Misogyny or microplastics? Global warming or the paramilitary-ICE take over? Obviously, we’re in an age of polycrisis, of multi-headed, interconnected catastrophes that we need to confront all at once.
Talk about drinking from a fire hose! But at least we have to keep trying.
I suffer from brief spells of wanting to just sink into the leftover muck in the park where I found that old inner tube and let all the change—the good and bad, but mostly the bad—just wash over me.
Instead, I shouldered that still heavy (but by now empty) inner tube, put one small foot in front of another, and hauled it out of the pond bed. As I dragged it along the path, I toggled between despair, hopelessness, and a steadfast grind of resolute, teeth-gritting effort to do good.
I can’t change the gutting of federal institutions or the assault on science. But I can pick up trash in a public park. I can’t end the Israel Defense Forces assault on Gaza, but I do boycott (no SodaStream for me). I have divested (my paltry nest egg) and I still support sanctions.
I can’t keep Donald Trump from building up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a paramilitary goon squad or stop the polar ice caps from melting, but I can smile at my neighbors, network with friends into rapid response whenever ICE shows up, and do my best not to use too much water.
It’s all so small, given everything we face, that it’s almost not worth mentioning. Still, that drying pond bed is at least a little cleaner, my community a little friendlier, and I am at least witnessing (and trying to alleviate) the suffering in Palestine. Shouldn’t that matter at least a little?
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