The world has entered an era of \u201cglobal water bankruptcy\u201d that is harming billions of people, a UN report has declared.<\/p>\n
The overuse and pollution of water must be tackled urgently, the report\u2019s lead author said, because no one knew when the whole system could collapse, with implications for peace and social cohesion.<\/p>\n
All life depends on water but the report found many societies had long been using water faster than it could be replenished annually in rivers and soils, as well as over-exploiting or destroying long-term stores of water in aquifers and wetlands.<\/p>\n
This had led to water bankruptcy, the report said, with many human water systems past the point at which they could be restored to former levels. The climate crisis was exacerbating the problem by melting glaciers, which store water, and causing whiplashes between extremely dry and wet weather<\/a>.<\/p>\n Prof Kaveh Madani, who led the report, said while not every basin and country was water bankrupt, the world was interconnected by trade and migration, and enough critical systems had crossed this threshold to fundamentally alter global water risk.<\/p>\n The result was a world in which 75% of people lived in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure and 2 billion people lived on ground that is sinking as groundwater aquifers collapse.<\/p>\n Conflicts over water had risen sharply since 2010, the report said, while major rivers, such as the Colorado, in the US, and the Murray-Darling system, in Australia, were failing to reach the sea, and \u201cday zero\u201d emergencies \u2013 when cities run out of water, such as in Chennai, India \u2013 were escalating. Half of the world\u2019s large lakes had shrunk since the early 1990s, the report noted. Even damp nations, such as the UK, were at risk because of reliance on imports of water-dependent food and other products.<\/p>\n \u201cThis report tells an uncomfortable truth: many critical water systems are already bankrupt,\u201d said Madani, of the UN University\u2019s Institute for Water<\/a>, Environment and Health. \u201cIt\u2019s extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n About 70% of fresh water taken by human withdrawals was used for agriculture, but Madani said: \u201cMillions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted or disappearing water sources. Water bankruptcy in India or Pakistan, for example, also means an impact on rice exports to a lot of places around the world.\u201d More than half of global food was grown in areas where water storage was declining or unstable, the report said.<\/p>\n Madani said action to deal with water bankruptcy offered a chance to bring countries together in an increasingly fragmented world. \u201cWater is a strategic, untapped opportunity to the world to create unity within and between nations. It is one of the very rare topics that left and right and north and south all agree on its importance.\u201d<\/p>\n Chart showing increasing number of conflicts over water<\/a><\/p>\n The UN report<\/a>, which is based on a forthcoming paper in the peer-reviewed journal Water Resources Management, sets out how population growth, urbanisation and economic growth have increased water demand for agriculture, industry, energy and cities. \u201cThese pressures have produced a global pattern that is now unmistakable,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n In some of the world\u2019s most densely populated river basins, including the Indus, Yellow, and Tigris-Euphrates, the rivers were periodically drying up before reaching the ocean. \u201cIn many basins, the \u2018normal\u2019 to which crisis managers once hoped to return has effectively vanished,\u201d the report said. Lakes were also shrinking, from Lake Urmia, in Iran, to the Salton Sea, in the US, and Lake Chad. Wildlife suffered as well as people, as humans \u201csteal\u201d water from nature, Madani said.<\/p>\n