UN warns world enter an era of ‘global water bankruptcy’

Decades of human activity have left “irreversible damage” to the planet’s water supply, Euronews writes.

A new report from the United Nations University (UNU) warns that decades of deforestation, pollution, soil degradation, water overallocation, and chronic groundwater depletion – compounded by global heating – have caused “irreversible damage” to the planet’s water supply and its ability to bounce back.

It argues that terms such as ‘water stress’ and ‘water crisis’ no longer accurately reflect today’s stark reality.

“Agriculture accounts for the vast majority of freshwater use and food systems are tightly interconnected through trade and price,” Kaveh Madani, Director of the UN’s think tank on water, says.

“When water scarcity undermines farming in one region, the effects ripple through global markets, political stability, and food security elsewhere. This makes water bankruptcy not a series of isolated local crises, but a shared global risk.”

This includes 50 per cent of large lakes worldwide that have lost water since the early 1990s. 410 million hectares of natural wetlands, an area almost equal to the size of the EU, have also been erased in the past five decades. Global glacier loss since the 1970s has increased by 30 per cent. Salinisation has damaged around 100 million hectares of cropland and 70 per cent of major aquifers (which hold and transmit groundwater) are showing long-term decline.

The report states that the world must stop treating water as a minor technical issue and start managing it as a major global crisis that affects the climate, food, and livelihoods.