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water pollution
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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Trump’s Budget Plan Would Make America Sicker, Hungrier, Poorer, Dirtier, and Hotter
His spending vision depicts a country where basic government functions—like keeping water safe and providing safety nets—are destroyed and corporate polluters can do what they please in the name of profits.
Jul 22, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is using every tool at his disposal to carry out his destructive agenda. From the passage of his Big, Ugly bill in Congress to his avalanche of executive orders, he’s breaking down basic government functions to clear the way for billionaire benefits and corporate profits. His latest tactic? A spending plan that would dismantle federal programs that keep us safe from pollution, support farmers and families, respond to disasters, and more.
At the end of May, Trump released a proposal for agency spending to guide congressional committees as they craft the next annual spending bill. Not to be confused with the recently passed Big, Ugly Bill, the upcoming spending legislation will fund the basic workings of the federal government for the fiscal year ahead (in this case, October 2025 to September 2026).
Trump’s spending proposal (called his discretionary budget request) makes his vision for the country crystal clear: Unsafe food, dirty water, and worse health for the many. Industrial polluters spewing toxic chemicals, and a destroyed ability to respond to the climate crisis that endangers all of us. Millions of farmers, families, and workers struggling to get by, while corporations amass yet more profits.
In the wake of Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill, his latest spending proposal is the opening salvo of another battle. Congress is now working to enact this vision, using this Trump proposal as a framework for its annual spending legislation. Here’s what’s at stake and how we’ll fight back.
Trump Promises Dirtier, Privatized Water
Not long ago, the United States’ rivers were so choked with pollution, they caught fire. Federal laws, like the Clean Water Act, changed that. Now, vast swaths of the country can depend on their taps for clean water.
Trump would drag us closer to those dark days by slashing programs that prevent pollution. His cuts would be a boon to corporate polluters who would rather preserve their profits than clean up their act.
Trump’s proposal has made his policy intentions clear—dirty water for all.
At the same time, he’s going after funding for infrastructure improvements we need to make our water safe and affordable. Federal government funding is crucial for water infrastructure for states, Tribes, and municipalities. However, this funding has plummeted in recent decades, and Trump wants to cut them even more drastically.
Trump’s deep cuts to water funding also serves as a ploy to encourage water systems to sell off their water systems to private corporations. And we already know that private water systems lead to less local control of water, higher water bills, and worse customer service.
Specifically, his spending plan called for:
Slashing Research and Regulation of Toxic Pollution
His plan calls for a 54% cut from the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA is key for researching and regulating toxic chemicals that poison our water. Without a strong EPA, we can’t address threats to our water like PFAS “forever chemicals” and microplastics.
Virtually Eliminating Funding for Drinking Water
Trump’s plan calls for a nearly 90% cut to the Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds, the main channels for federal dollars to states and localities for safe and clean water (that’s a cut of more than $2 billion).
Trump wants to completely eliminate these funds going forward, encouraging states to find “alternative funding sources” that could lead to private equity takeovers of local water supplies.
Dirtier Beaches and Dirtier Water
Trump’s plan calls for a complete elimination of many programs that provide clean water grants. That includes all EPA grants for beach protection, pollution control and prevention, clean and safe water technical assistance, and more.
Leaving Tribes and Rural Communities High and Dry
His plan would make huge cuts to water and wastewater grants specifically for Tribes and rural communities.
House Republicans lawmakers recently released their proposal for cuts to EPA and drinking safe and clean water programs, and while they aren’t as deep as Trump demanded, it would still be disastrous for our communities. And Trump’s proposal has made his policy intentions clear—dirty water for all.
Trump Takes Away Key Support for Farmers and Families
Trump’s spending plan also attacks programs that feed millions of families, support farmers and ranchers, and make our food more safe and sustainable. At the same time, Trump’s plan includes major giveaways to Big Ag. For one, he wants to completely eliminate funding for the EPA’s pesticides program and enforcement. The House Republican spending proposal would take a step in that direction by including Cancer Gag Act language to block EPA from improving rules for warning labels on pesticides.
Despite Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rhetoric, his boss is working to make our food supply more dangerous for farmers, farm workers, and anyone who eats, helping pesticide companies to further profit from their toxic products.
Additionally, Trump would gut enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act. Without enforcement, meat corporations will get away with more dirty tactics in the market, putting livable incomes even further out of reach for farmers and ranchers.
Trump wants to:
Condemn People to Hunger
His spending plan slashes $748 million from the Agriculture Department’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (on top of what the Big Ugly bill already slashed).
These cuts threaten the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps more than 40 million people put food on the table. The cuts may also impact WIC, the SNAP program targeted to Women, Infants, and Children, and school lunch programs.
Roll Back Sustainable Agriculture
Trump’s plan reduces funding for the Nation Resources Conservation Service by almost 90%, from $916 million to $112 million. This threatens programs that support urban agriculture, conservation, and educational opportunities for farmers.
Undermine Conservation and Disaster Recovery
His spending plan slashes Farm Service Agency funding by $372 million, cutting loans and assistance to farmers for conservation and disaster recovery.
Completely Eliminate Good Food Programs
His plan zeros out key programs like the Source Water Protection Program, Geographically Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers, and Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion that support farmers and a more resilient and sustainable food system.
Trump Wants Big Oil to Wreak Havoc on Our Planet
Our reliance on fossil fuels is making us sicker and poorer. From toxic pollution, to volatile energy prices, to the climate crisis, the harms are vast and growing. Trump’s budget would add fuel to the fire by clawing back funding for clean, renewable energy and ramping up support for Big Oil and Gas.
This will put more profits in the pockets of fossil fuel tycoons, while fossil-fueled climate change makes our power bills even more expensive. At the same time, Trump’s proposal would completely eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps about 6 million people keep the lights on.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Trump would kneecap federal programs that predict and respond to life-threatening climate disasters, even as those disasters grow in frequency and intensity. In the wake of horrific flash flooding in central Texas, these cuts will kill people.
Specifically, Trump’s spending plan:
Promotes Dirty Fossil Fuels
His spending plan allocates $2 billion to a new “Fossil Energy Programming” line item and increases spending for fossil fuel research and development.
Slashes Solar, Wind, and Energy Efficiency
His plan cuts funding by at least $6.2 billion. That includes the elimination of USDA funding ($500 million) for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs for farmers. Trump also calls for eliminating the Department of Interior’s onshore renewable energy and offshore wind programs.
Halts Vital Climate Change Research
The plan calls for the total elimination of the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, closing all its weather and climate labs and slashes NASA climate monitoring.
Attacks Disaster Recovery
Trump’s plan eliminates a third of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) budget. Trump released his new proposal just days before he announced plans to start “phasing out” FEMA entirely.
Already alarms are being rung that the elimination of critical services due to mass layoffs and cuts at the National Weather Services and FEMA have hampered emergency preparations and response to the devastating floods in Texas.
Join Us in Stopping Trump’s Vision from Becoming Reality
Trump’s spending vision shows his hand in stark numbers. It depicts a country where basic government functions—like keeping water safe and providing safety nets—are destroyed and corporate polluters can do what they please in the name of profits.
If Congress follows his direction, we face a sicker, hungrier, poorer nation. More family farms will have to shutter. More pollution will flood our waterways. Lives and our livable future is at stake.
Congress controls the purse strings, and right now Congress members are writing this spending bill. We need to remind them that they answer to us—not Trump.
But we know that with concerted, strategic efforts, we can overcome much of Trump’s agenda. Already, we’ve defeated several terrible provisions moving through Congress. With dedicated supporters like you, we’ve stopped Republican efforts to roll back a key water safety rule and successfully defended school lunch programs from direct cuts and public lands from privatization.
In the end, Congress controls the purse strings, and right now Congress members are writing this spending bill. We need to remind them that they answer to us—not Trump. That’s why, over the next couple months, Food & Water Watch will relentlessly fight these cuts. Since inauguration day, Food & Water Watch staff, members and supporters have rallied dozens of times, sent tens of thousands of calls and emails, met with lawmakers and staffers, and made our voices heard in social media and news outlets.
This is the kind of energy and action we need to push our leaders in Congress to do the right thing. They must stand up against Trump and stand up for us.
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The International Finance Corporation’s Dubious Defense of Factory Farming
Instead of funding industrial agriculture the IFC should help small-scale farmers move to agroecology and regenerative farming which can boost yields, reduce the use of expensive inputs, and improve livelihoods.
Apr 30, 2025
The International Finance Corporation’s website brands many of the well-founded criticisms of industrial animal production as “myths.” This reflects the regrettably polarized debate between those who believe that industrial agriculture is needed to feed the growing world population and those who, like me, argue that a far-reaching transformation of our food system is needed.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) website states that it is a myth that industrial animal production is bad for food security. The truth, however, is that factory farming diverts food away from people; it is dependent on feeding grain—corn, wheat, barley—to animals who convert these crops very inefficiently into meat and milk. For every 100 calories of human-edible cereals fed to animals, just 7-27 calories (depending on the species) enter the human food chain as meat. And for every 100 grams of protein in human-edible cereals fed to animals, only 13-37 grams of protein enter the human food chain as meat.
The scale of this is massive. International Grains Council data show that 45% of global grain production is used as animal feed, while 76% of world soy production is used to feed animals. The inefficiency of doing this is recognized by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which states that it is “essential to fight food insecurity and malnutrition… Reducing the use of much of the world's grain production to feed animals and producing more food for direct human consumption can significantly contribute to this objective.” I calculate that if the use of cereals as animal feed were ended, an extra 2 billion people could be fed even allowing for the fact that if we reared fewer animals we would need to grow more crops for direct human consumption. My figure is very cautious; other studies calculate that ending the use of grains as animal feed would enable an extra 3.5-4 billion people to be fed. Moreover, industrial livestock’s huge demand for these cereals pushes up their price, potentially placing them out of reach of poor populations in the Global South. So, sorry IFC, but it really is not a myth to say that industrial animal production is bad for food security.
To dismiss the harsh suffering endured by industrially farmed animals as a myth is extraordinary
The IFC website dismisses as a myth the argument that industrial animal production is bad for the environment. However, factory farms disgorge large amounts of manure, slurry, and ammonia that pollute air and watercourses. When ammonia mixes with other gases it can form particulate matter; this is a key component of air pollution, which can lead to heart and pulmonary disease, respiratory problems including asthma, and lung cancer.
Industrial livestock’s huge demand for cereals as feed has been a key factor fuelling the intensification of crop production. This pivotal link between the livestock and arable sectors is often not recognized. With its monocultures and high use of chemical pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers, intensive crop production leads to soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and overuse and pollution of water. In short, it erodes the key fundamentals—soils, water, and biodiversity—on which our future ability to feed ourselves depends.
Arjem Hoekstra (2020) calculates that animals fed on cereals and soy (industrially farmed animals) use 43 times as much surface- and groundwater and are 61 times as polluting of water as animals fed on grass and other roughages. Its adherents claim that factory farming saves land by cramming animals into crowded sheds. But in reality it eats up huge amounts of cropland for feed. European Union studies show that feed production accounts for 99% of the land use of the pig and broiler sectors. It is feed production—not the tiny amount of space given to animals on the farm—that makes factory farming so land-hungry.
The contention that industrial systems undermine the socioeconomic potential of small-scale farmers in the developing world is also branded a myth by the IFC. The World Bank, however, takes a different view. Its 2024 report Recipe for a Liveable Planet states, “The global agrifood system disproportionately and detrimentally affects poor communities and smallholder farmers who cannot compete with industrial agriculture, thereby exacerbating rural poverty and increasing landlessness.” Instead of funding industrial agriculture the IFC should help small-scale farmers move to agroecology and regenerative farming which can boost yields, reduce the use of expensive inputs, and improve livelihoods.
Also swatted aside as a myth is the mountain of scientific evidence that industrial livestock production results in poor animal welfare. To dismiss the harsh suffering endured by industrially farmed animals as a myth is extraordinary. In its own Good Practice Note on animal welfare the IFC lists what are commonly recognized to be the key characteristics of factory farming—confinement in narrow stalls, overcrowding, barren environments, painful procedures, hunger, and breeding for high yields leading to health disorders—and identifies them as “welfare risks” that need to be tackled. But now, in a remarkable volte-face, the IFC airily dismisses these problems as a myth.
IFC’s position stands in sharp contrast to UNEP, which states that “intensive systems deprive animals of some of their most basic physical and psychological needs.” World Bank economist Berk Özler has written about the value of policies under which low-income countries can grow without causing massive increases in suffering among farmed animals. He writes, “Perhaps many low-income countries can leapfrog the stage of industrial animal farming, towards something more sensible.”
I urge the IFC to recognize that industrial animal agriculture is destructive—destructive of food security, the environment, small-scale farmer livelihoods, and the well-being of animals.
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