Amid alarming global water shortages, a UN report declares a new era of ‘water bankruptcy’, emphasising the need for urgent action and redefined policies to address irreversible losses. United Nations water experts are calling for the formal recognition of a new era of global water “bankruptcy”, arguing that terms such as water “stress” or “crisis” no longer reflect the seriousness of the irreversible losses from the world’s declining bank of fresh water. In a report released at the UN headquarters in New York on 20 January, academics and senior water officials said the concept of water “bankruptcy” was being presented not just as a metaphor to communicate the severity of the problem, but also to mark the beginning of concerted political action to start undoing decades of systematic overspending of surface and groundwater that have pushed water systems into failure mode.
The report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era,argues that the familiar terms “water stress” and “water crisis” fail to reflect today’s reality in many places: a condition marked by irreversible losses of natural water capital and an inability to bounce back to historic baselines. “This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” according to lead author ProfessorKaveh Madani, the head of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Ontario, Canada. Madani, a prominent Iranian scientist and former deputy head of his country’s environment department, fled Iran in 2018 during agovernment crackdown on environmentalists.
He had been particularly critical of Iran’s aggressive dam-building and cloud-seeding projects. Madani says his call for new language to describe the current situation is not simply an issue of semantics. “Language shapes policy.
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Calling a chronic, self-inflicted condition a ‘crisis’ implies that societies can and should return to a pre-crisis normal. In many water-stressed regions, that normal no longer exists. Checking accounts have been drained, savings accounts overdrawn, and natural assets sold off to pay short-term bills,” he said.
“Just like a crisis and disaster, bankruptcy involves severe threats and losses, but it is not a temporary episode. It is astructural conditionin which obligations systematically exceed the system’s capacity to meet them. Water bankruptcy occurs when natural income and liquid assets, even if fully mobilised, can no longer cover existing claims without unacceptable sacrifice of essential functions and damaging the natural capital.” Drawing on global datasets and recent scientific evidence, the new UN report presents a sobering overview of trends, mostly caused by humans: Madani asserts that many water managers and politicians are in denial and continue to make promises, implying that the problem is only temporary and can be mitigated.
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