World enters ‘era of global water bankruptcy’, UN warns
Major report calls for a fundamental reset of the global water agenda as overconsumption pushes many water sources beyond recovery.
A combination of chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation, pollution and climate change are making the world’s water supply ‘bankrupt’, the UN has warned.
A major report by the UN spells out the problem using the analogy of the financial system. Many societies have not only overspent their annual renewable water ‘income’ from rivers, soils, and snowpack, they have depleted long-term ‘savings’ in aquifers, glaciers, wetlands, and other natural reservoirs.
This has resulted in a growing list of compacted aquifers, subsided land in deltas and coastal cities, vanished lakes and wetlands, and irreversibly lost biodiversity, it said.
What is ‘water bankruptcy’?
Water bankruptcy is defined as when surface and groundwater sources have been persistently over-withdrawn relative to replenishment. This results in irreversible or prohibitively costly loss of water-related natural capital.
The UN stressed that it was no longer adequate to talk about ‘water stress’ and ‘water crisis’, since those terms refer to reversible or short-term challenges.
While not every basin and country is yet water-bankrupt, the report stresses that enough critical systems around the world have crossed these thresholds.
These systems are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies, leaving the global risk landscape now ‘fundamentally altered’.
“This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” says lead author Kaveh Madani, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), also known as ‘the UN’s Think Tank on Water’.
“Water bankruptcy not a series of isolated local crises, but a shared global risk that demands a new type of response: bankruptcy management, not crisis management,” he added.
Which regions have the worst pressures on water?
The report points out that a region can be flooded one year and still be water bankrupt if long-term withdrawals exceed replenishment. It points to three regions as having particular challenges with water:
- The Middle East and North Africa region, where high water stress, climate vulnerability, low agricultural productivity, energy-intensive desalination, and sand and dust storms intersect with complex political economies.
- Parts of South Asia are experiencing chronic declines in water tables and local subsidence due to groundwater-dependent agriculture and urbanisation.
- The American Southwest, where the Colorado River and its reservoirs have become ‘symbols of over-promised water’.
Globally, 50% of large lakes worldwide have lost water since the early 1990s. Some 25% of humanity is directly dependent on these lakes.
Around 70% of major aquifers show long-term decline, while dozens of major rivers now fail to reach the sea for parts of the year.
Three quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure.
Two billion people live on sinking ground caused by groundwater abstraction, with some cities experiencing an annual drop of 25cm.
Three billion people are living in areas where total water storage is declining or unstable, with 50% or more of global food produced in those same stressed regions.
Madani said: “Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted, or disappearing water sources. Without rapid transitions toward water-smart agriculture, water bankruptcy will spread rapidly.”
The world must recognise that investment is needed in water to bring about long-term benefits for peace, stability, security, equity, economy, health, and the environment, rather than just investing in solving problems caused by lack of supply, the report said.
News references:
Madani K. Water Bankruptcy: The Formal Definition, Water Resources Management, 19 January 2026.
United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, 20 January 2026.