The world is entering an era of

The planet is entering an era of global “water bankruptcy,” a United Nations research agency said in a new report, warning that long-term human water use has exceeded renewable water sources around the world and potentially passed a point of no return.

“Bankruptcy” means the Earth’s water reservoirs, such as riverslakes and aquifers, are being depleted at a faster rate than they can be recovered, according to the report by researchers at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).

“In many regions, drinking water systems are already in a state of post-crisis failure,” the report’s authors wrote.

That failure, they say, is the result of decades of overexertion, in which “societies have extracted more water than climate and hydrology can reliably provide,” while environmental factors such as pollution reduced the amount of water that can be safely used by degrading its quality. The consequences are measurable, especially in deeply affected regions of the Middle East and North Africa, parts of South Asia, and the southwestern United States.

There are dozens of major rivers that do not reach the sea during some parts of the year, and many river basins and aquifers have been “overexploiting” their water quota for at least the last five decades, according to the report. Half of the world’s large lakes have lost water since the early 1990s, a pattern of decline that affects about 25% of the world’s population. Researchers say increased demand for that water, as well as changes in inflows and rising temperatures, are largely to blame.

While river basins are also experiencing alterations in their typical flow, the wetland environments that scientists describe as traditional “buffers” of the water cycle are also disappearing. More than one billion acres of natural wetlands have been erased in the last 50 years – an area roughly equal to the size of continental Europe – threatening the communities they normally help protect. floods and drought.

“These are not simply signs of stress or crisis episodes,” the report says. “They are symptoms of systems that have overspent their hydrological budget and eroded the natural capital that once made recovery possible, with effects on food prices, employment, migration and geopolitical stability.”

According to the report, around 75% of the human population resides in countries that have been classified as “water insecure” or “critically water insecure.” That means their nations cannot reliably provide them with enough water that meets basic safety and quality standards.

Within that group, some 4 billion people face severe water shortages for at least one month each year, 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation services and 2.2 billion lack safely managed drinking water, according to the report. Another 3 billion live in areas where total water storage is declining or unstable, and at least half of the world’s food is produced in those same regions.

“Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from dwindling, contaminated or disappearing water sources,” Kaveh Madani, director of UNU-INWEH and lead author of the report, said in a statement. “Without a rapid transition to water-smart agriculture, water bankruptcy will spread rapidly.”

The report recommended a combination of efforts to address the water shortage, including aiming to restore what has been lost, avoiding current depletion and adapting to the amount of usable water that exists now.

“Water failure is becoming a driver of fragility, displacement and conflict,” UN Under-Secretary-General Tshilidzi Marwala said in a separate statement. “Managing it fairly – ensuring vulnerable communities are protected and inevitable losses are shared equitably – is now critical to maintaining peace, stability and social cohesion.”