A new United Nations report states that vast regions of the planet have already crossed points of no return in water management. The language of “crisis” is no longer sufficient: the world is living beyond its hydrological means.
The world has officially entered a new era: that of “global water bankruptcy.” This conclusion does not come from an activist manifesto, but from a scientific report by the United Nations, presented on Monday in New York. Entitled Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, the study by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) argues that many water systems are no longer merely under pressure or in crisis — they are, quite simply, insolvent.
But what does “water bankruptcy” mean? In economic terms, bankruptcy occurs when a company or an individual can no longer pay their debts. And in this context? The UN report explains that the term refers to the overexploitation of surface and groundwater relative to renewable inflows and safe depletion levels. “The term also implies irreversible or prohibitively costly loss of natural capital associated with water.” It should be noted that this concept differs from water stress. In the latter case, pressure still allows for recovery and is reversible — unlike bankruptcy.
The central idea is uncomfortable but clear: in many regions of the planet, water is being used at a rate far greater than what nature can replenish. This is not merely about temporary scarcity or shocks caused by extreme droughts. What is at stake is the irreversible loss of natural capital — compacted aquifers, destroyed wetlands, disappearing glaciers — which makes a return to past conditions impossible.
“We are living beyond our hydrological means,” says Kaveh Madani, Director of UNU-INWEH and lead author of the report. “Many critical water systems are already bankrupt. They cannot recover, even if it rains.”
From crisis to bankruptcy
The report proposes a radical change in language — and in policy. Terms such as “water stress” or “water crisis” have become insufficient to describe the current reality. The former assumes reversibility; the latter, a temporary shock. Water bankruptcy, by contrast, describes a post-crisis state: when overuse and pollution persistently exceed safe limits and cause damage that can no longer be reversed, or only at prohibitive cost.
The financial analogy is deliberate. Like a country that exhausts its reserves and continues to borrow, many societies have not only consumed their annual “income” of water — rivers, soils, precipitation — but have also depleted their “savings”: groundwater, glaciers, lakes, and wetlands.
The consequences are visible worldwide: cities sinking due to land subsidence, deltas becoming more vulnerable to flooding, rivers failing to reach the sea, collapsed ecosystems, and biodiversity lost forever.
The report explains that water bankruptcy has nothing to do with a place being drier or wetter, since even regions that experience floods every year can be in water bankruptcy if they spend beyond their annual “income” of renewable water.
A global and interconnected problem
Although not all countries or river basins are in a state of bankruptcy, the report emphasizes that a sufficient number of critical systems have already crossed thresholds that alter the global risk landscape. In a world interconnected by food systems, trade, and migration, the impacts spread far beyond national borders.
Agriculture, responsible for about 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, lies at the heart of the problem. More than 40% of irrigation water comes from aquifers that are being depleted unsustainably. At the same time, about 50% of domestic water supply also depends on groundwater. When these reserves collapse, both food security and human water supply collapse simultaneously.
According to the report, three billion people live in regions where total water storage is declining — areas that produce more than half of the world’s food. The consequences are felt in prices, political stability, and migration flows.
Numbers in the red
The diagnosis is supported by stark data. More than 70% of the world’s major aquifers show long-term declining trends. Since the 1970s, some regions have lost more than 30% of their glacier mass, jeopardizing future water supply for hundreds of millions of people. About 410 million hectares of wetlands — an area nearly equivalent to the European Union — have disappeared over the past 50 years.
The human impact is equally severe: nearly four billion people face severe water scarcity for at least one month per year; 2.2 billion lack access to safely managed drinking water; and two billion live on land that is subsiding, often irreversibly. The economic cost of droughts, increasingly “anthropogenic,” already amounts to 307 billion dollars per year.
A matter of justice and security
The report insists that water bankruptcy is not merely an environmental or technical issue. It is a matter of social justice and global security. The costs of degradation fall disproportionately on small farmers, Indigenous communities, rural populations, women, and youth — while the benefits of excessive water use have often been captured by more powerful actors.
For Tshilidzi Marwala, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Rector of UNU, “the way countries manage water bankruptcy will be decisive for peace, stability, and social cohesion.”
Managing bankruptcies instead of crises
In light of this scenario, the report argues for a paradigm shift: abandoning crisis management logic and adopting a bankruptcy management approach. This means accepting that not everything can be recovered, but that it is still possible to prevent further losses and to redistribute fairly the costs of transition.
Among the priorities are protecting remaining natural capital, reassessing water rights and usage expectations, transforming intensive sectors such as agriculture and industry, and supporting just transitions for communities whose ways of life will have to change.
More than a sign of resignation, the report presents itself as a call for political honesty. “Declaring bankruptcy is not giving up,” says Madani. “It is recognizing reality in order to start again.”
With the UN Water Conference in 2026, the end of the Water Decade in 2028, and the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals, the authors argue that the world has a final window to redefine its relationship with water. Otherwise, the deficit will continue to grow — until there is nothing left to manage.
Jornal Económico , 26/01/2026
