{"id":257660,"date":"2026-01-29T12:34:28","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T12:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/257660\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T12:34:28","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T12:34:28","slug":"water-supply-bankruptcy-puts-billions-at-risk-u-n-report-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/257660\/","title":{"rendered":"Water supply ‘bankruptcy’ puts billions at risk, U.N. report warns"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world is facing irreversible water \u201cbankruptcy,\u201d with billions of people struggling to cope with the consequences of decades of overuse as well as shrinking supplies<\/a> from lakes, rivers, glaciers and wetlands, U.N. researchers said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Nearly three-quarters of the global population live in countries classified as \u201cwater insecure\u201d or \u201ccritically water insecure,\u201d and 4 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month per year, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned in a report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,\u201d said Kaveh Madani, lead author and director of the institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy acknowledging the reality of water bankruptcy, we can finally make the hard choices that will protect people, economies and ecosystems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The report said water supplies are \u201calready in a post-crisis state of failure\u201d after decades of unsustainable extraction rates that have drawn down water \u201csavings\u201d contained in aquifers, glaciers, soils, wetlands and river ecosystems, with supplies also degraded by pollution.<\/p>\n

More than 170 million hectares of irrigated cropland \u2014 an area larger than Iran \u2014 are under \u201chigh\u201d or \u201cvery high\u201d water stress, and economic damage from land degradation, groundwater depletion and climate change amounts to more than $300 billion a year worldwide, the report said.<\/p>\n

Three billion people and more than half of global food production are concentrated in areas already facing unstable or declining water storage levels, while salinization has also degraded more than 100 million hectares of cropland, it said.<\/p>\n

The researchers wrote that the current approach to solving water problems was no longer fit for purpose, and the priority was not \u201creturning to normal\u201d but a new “global water agenda<\/a>” designed to minimize damage.<\/p>\n

However, Jonathan Paul, geoscience professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, said the report did not address one major factor behind the crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe elephant in the room, which is mentioned explicitly only once, is the role of massive and uneven population growth in driving so many of the manifestations of water bankruptcy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The world is facing irreversible water \u201cbankruptcy,\u201d with billions of people struggling to cope with the consequences of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257661,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-257660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}