‘Normal is gone’ – UN researchers announce the world has entered a state of water ‘bankruptcy’

UN researchers have announced that the world has now entered into a state of global water ‘bankruptcy,’ with their latest report titled: ‘Living beyond our hydrological means in a post-crisis era‘.

UN News highlighted that what was once viewed as a temporary issue — described by experts as a ‘crisis’ with the possibility of recovery — is no longer true.

By contrast, it’s now the case that the shortage of water is so persistent in some regions that – realistically speaking – they will never return to their previous baselines.

Insolvency and irreversibility

The report used a finance metaphor to characterise this new era of ecological post-collapse, using two concept of insolvency and irreversibility:

Insolvency refers to withdrawing and polluting water beyond renewable inflows and safe depletion limits.

Irreversibility refers to the damage to key parts of water-related natural capital, such as wetlands and lakes, that makes restoration of the system to its initial conditions infeasible.

Following the analogy, the study’s authors wrote of rivers, reservoirs, soil moisture, and snow as acting like a checking account. By contrast, non- or slowly-renewing resources like groundwater and glaciers are more like savings accounts.

Alarmingly, it’s these ‘water savings accounts’ that the world is rapidly depleting. Since the 1990s, more than half of all lakes have declined. Similarly, over a third of the world’s natural wetlands have disappeared in the last 50 years.

Anthropogenic drought

This state of bankruptcy has not yet spread throughout the entire world. However, the proximity of the failed systems to one another is a major cause for alarm. As the report stated:

In many basins and aquifers, long-term overuse and degradation mean that past hydrological and ecological baselines cannot realistically be restored. While not every basin or country is water-bankrupt, enough critical systems around the world have crossed these thresholds—and are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies—that the global risk landscape is now fundamentally altered.

The number of people living in water-insecure or critically water-insecure areas has already hit nearly three-quarters of the world’s population. Likewise, roughly four billion people are hit by severe water scarcity for at least a month out of every year.

And, with grim predictability, the failed water systems have a disproportionate impact on some of the most economically disadvantaged people in the world. These include Indigenous Peoples, smallholder farmers, rural communities, informal urban residents, women, and youth.

Meanwhile, “more powerful actors” — as the report phrases it — reap the benefits of overusing the world’s water stores. Likewise, the report also laid the blame for water bankruptcy squarely at the feet of anthropogenic drought. That is to say:

Drought and water shortage are increasingly driven by human activities – over-allocation, groundwater depletion, land and soil degradation, deforestation, pollution, and climate change – rather than natural variability alone.

‘Normal is gone’

The Institute for Water, Environment and Health at the UN University assembled the bleak findings of the study. At a 20 January press briefing in New York, Kaveh Madani, the institute’s director, explained that:

For much of the world, ‘normal’ is gone.

This is not to kill hope but to encourage action and an honest admission of failure today to protect and enable tomorrow.

Following the finance analogy, he explained the form that action must take in response to bankruptcy:

It is the start of a structured recovery plan: you stop the bleeding, protect essential services, restructure unsustainable claims, and invest in rebuilding.

Which that being said, Madani also said that the way we conceive of this reaction must be fundamentally different to our previous, inadequate efforts:

If we continue to manage these failures as temporary ‘crises’ with short-term fixes, we will only deepen the ecological damage and fuel social conflict.

The report calls for policies that match the new reality of the world’s water systems, rather than what was normal for previous decades. Part of this reality is that water bankruptcy is an international issues, and as such the solution must also transcend borders:

Trade, finance, migration, climate feedbacks, and shared ecosystems connect water- bankrupt systems across borders. Managing Global Water Bankruptcy therefore requires stronger international cooperation and a higher profile for water across the multilateral system.

The burdens of water bankruptcy fall disproportionately on the world’s poorest, whilst the rich and powerful reaped the benefits of drawing down on the planet’s water savings. This is a categorical injustice, and the very least that the world’s powerful can do is shoulder the costs of reversing this decline.

As we move forward, we must work from an honest understanding that some of these losses are truly irreversible. Now, we have to work to protect the water resources that are not yet beyond saving.

Featured image via the Canary