Humanity has spent the annual income of water from rivers and rain, emptied the savings stored in glaciers, wetlands and aquifers and the result is broken aquatic systems – compacted aquifers, ghost lakes and sinking deltas – with no capacity to recover.
This is the conclusion reached by a audit of the United Nations University (UNU) which declares that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy”, “a point of no return for certain systems where human demand has irreversibly exhausted aquifer savings and dried up the wells of the future, putting the planet’s entire water system at risk.”
From tap to vacuum
According to the study data, “unsustainable progress has led us to drink the water with which to quench our insatiable thirst for consumption.” This waste is reflected in intensive agriculture, urban and industrial growth, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that have caused climate change. All this imposes some devastating risks to our water reserves, longer droughts, accelerated evaporation and essential rains.
“Many regions have lived far beyond their hydrological possibilities. It is like having a bank account from which money is withdrawn every day without a single deposit entering. The balance is already negative,” he explains. Kaveh Madani, lead author of the UNU report. The result is that today we pay a water bill that we cannot pay.
The bill of waste
The global audit paints a bleak picture, 75% of the world’s population lives in countries where water is scarce or unsafe; More than half of the planet’s large lakes are drying up; 2 billion people live on land that is sinking due to the overexploitation of groundwater and in just fifty years wetlands equivalent to the entire surface of the European Union have been lost.
The crisis of nature knows no borders. Agriculture, which consumes 70% of fresh water, is the epicenter of the collapse. When crops dry up in a region, shortages travel through food prices, hitting global food security and destabilizing economies. “The water that is missing here is noticeable in the food there. This bankruptcy is not a local problem, it is a systemic risk that flows through the veins of global trade,” warns Madani.
“Water bankruptcy is becoming a driver of fragility, displacement and conflict,” explains the UN Under-Secretary-General Tshilidzi Marwala, UNU Rector.
Water to rebuild the world
Faced with this scenario, the report makes an urgent call for action to manage “the bankruptcy, not the crisis” and requests that the state of “water bankruptcy” of the planet be formally recognized, “we are not only facing a hydrological problem, but rather a question of justice with profound social and political implications, which requires attention at the highest level of governments and multilateral cooperation.” This implies transforming agriculture, fairly distributing a dwindling resource and protecting the ecosystems that still produce water.
“Declaring bankruptcy is not about giving up; it is about starting over. By recognizing the reality of water bankruptcy, we can finally make the difficult decisions that will protect people, economies and ecosystems,” says Mandani.
Now All eyes are on the UN Water Conference, which will be held in December of this year and that is presented as an opportunity for this “water rescue.” The message seems clear, although we cannot fill the depleted aquifers again, we still have time to protect every drop and perhaps thus learn to live with the water that remains on the planet.