Taking a shower, drinking from the tap, watering a field. In much of the world, these everyday activities now depend on a resource that is no longer renewable: water. Seawards echoes a new United Nations report that states that the planet has entered an “era of global water bankruptcy,” marked by freshwater scarcity, water stress, and the depletion of water resources.
The diagnosis is stark. “It’s not to kill hope, but to encourage action,” explains Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), which commissioned the study. “We must honestly acknowledge today’s failure to make tomorrow possible.”
Moving beyond the vocabulary of the water crisis
For decades, scientists and politicians have been warning of a “global water crisis.” According to the report, this term has become misleading. “The word crisis suggests something temporary: a shock, an emergency, then a return to normal. However, in many basins, the old normal has already disappeared,” insists Kaveh Madani.
The report coins the concept of water bankruptcy: a sustainable post-crisis state in which usage and pollution have exceeded renewable supplies, and where natural capital groundwater, wetlands, soils, rivers, glaciers, is damaged.
irreversibly or at prohibitive cost.
Water resources: a planet that has depleted its “savings”. Like an accounting balance sheet, humanity has not only consumed its “hydrological income,” but has also begun to dip into its “savings.” More than half of the world’s large lakes have been declining since the 1990s; 70% of large aquifers are showing a long-term decline; and 410 million hectares of wetlands have disappeared since 1970, representing an estimated annual loss of $5.1 trillion in ecosystem services.
“In many places, these economies are not replenishing themselves within a human lifetime,” warns Kaveh Madani. “This report is not a warning about a future that we could still avoid everywhere. It is a diagnosis of a world where, in many basins, there is no turning back.”
Global water stress: a spreading failure
Water failure is neither uniform nor universal: it is measured basin by basin. But enough critical systems have tipped over to transform the global risk landscape, through food markets, supply chains, migration, and geopolitical dependencies.
Nearly three-quarters of humanity now lives in countries classified as “precarious” in terms of water. More than 4 billion people experience severe shortages at least one month per year, and half of the world’s food production comes from regions
where total water storage is declining or becoming unstable. Water governance: from crisis management to bankruptcy management. Faced with this reality, the report calls for abandoning the logic of crisis management, consisting of emergency responses and untenable promises, in favor of bankruptcy management, based on recognition of physical limits, sober use, and explicit trade-offs.
Far from being a purely technical debate, water bankruptcy is also a question of social justice and security. The costs of overexploitation fall primarily on small farmers, indigenous peoples, and poor urban populations, while the benefits have often been captured by the most powerful actors.
“If we continue to treat these failures as temporary crises, we will deepen ecological damage and fuel social conflict,” warns the director of the UN institute. The upcoming UN conferences on water, scheduled for 2026 and 2028, the end of the International Decade for Water, and the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals provide a critical political window of opportunity to reset the global water agenda.
Producing and preserving fresh water in a constrained world
This diagnosis implies a fundamental rethinking of water production and management models: the limits of an infrastructure-only approach, the need for restraint, diversification of fresh water sources, and water innovations compatible with energy and environmental constraints.
For Seawards, this observation resonates as a call to accelerate disruptive technological (such as cryoseparation), economic, and governance solutions that are capable not of denying the limits, but of preserving and restoring global water capital.
Seawards echoes a new United Nations report that states that the planet has entered an “era of global water bankruptcy,” marked by freshwater scarcity, water stress, and the depletion of water resources. Seawards echoes a new United Nations report that states that the planet has entered an “era of global water bankruptcy,” marked by freshwater scarcity, water stress, and the depletion of water resources.
