Janvier 2026
UNU-INWEH, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (72 pages).
Water is the quiet infrastructure of everything the United Nations cares about: human security and prosperity, food and energy security, biodiversity, environmental resilience, public health, climate stability, and peace. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6) captures this centrality by committing the world to ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. Yet, the world is still very far from meeting SDG 6. About 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.5 billion lack safely
managed sanitation, and about 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month per year. Nearly 75% of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure with progress toward SDG 6 is far off track for 2030. These figures indicate that water-related risks are now systemic rather than marginal.
For decades, the global policy and science communities have warned of an escalating “water crisis” and called for accelerated action to avert it.
Those warnings were not wrong, but they are now incomplete. The language of crisis — suggesting a temporary emergency followed by a return to normal through mitigation efforts — no longer captures what is happening in many parts of the world.
This report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNUINWEH) on the 30th anniversary of its inception responds to this gap by offering a new, more precise diagnosis and recommendations for a new governance agenda fitting the water realities of the Anthropocene in the 21st century. The report is a wake-up call and an open invitation to the policy community to use water as a powerful bridge to promote cooperation to address some of the most critical security, peace, justice, development, and sustainability challenges of our time.
The central message of this report is direct: the world has entered the era of Global Water Bankruptcy. In many regions, human–water systems are already in a post-crisis state of failure. Over decades, societies have withdrawn more water than climate and hydrology can reliably provide, drawing down not only the annual “income” of renewable flows but also the “savings” stored in aquifers, glaciers, soils, wetlands, and river ecosystems. At the same time, pollution, salinization, and other forms of water quality degradation have reduced the fraction of water that is safely usable.
The consequences of water bankruptcy are now visible on every continent: rivers that no longer reach the sea; lakes, wetlands, and glaciers that have shrunk or disappeared; aquifers pumped down until land subsides and salt intrudes; forests and peatlands drying and burning; deserts and dust functioning more efficiently within tighter hydrologic limits through reconfigured economics, governance institutions, and development models, while recognizing non-stationary climatic and changed environmental conditions.
The report reframes the water governance challenge for a post-crisis era. Rather than asking only how to avoid a future water crisis, it asks what it means to govern human-water systems on a waterbankrupt planet: how to admit insolvency where it exists; how to manage irreversibility honestly; how to share unavoidable losses fairly; and how to design institutions, development pathways, and financial frameworks that prevent further overspending of hydrological capital and damage to the underlying natural capital.
The report emphasizes that water bankruptcy is also a justice, security and political economy challenge. Water bankruptcy management must therefore be explicitly equity-oriented: securing basic human needs and critical services; safeguarding environmental flows; providing compensation and social protection where livelihoods must change; and strengthening grievance and conflict resolution mechanisms at local, national, and transboundary levels. Without this justice lens, necessary reforms risk fueling social unrest and undermining the
political viability of transitions.
Finally, the report situates Global Water Bankruptcy within the wider multilateral landscape and the realities of a fragmented world. It argues that the current global water agenda — focused primarily on safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), incremental efficiency gains and generic IWRM prescriptions — is no longer fit for purpose in the Anthropocene or for an era of growing geopolitical tensions and stalled multilateral processes. It calls for a new water agenda that recognizes water as both a constraint and an opportunity sector for achieving the goals of the Rio Conventions and the 2030 Agenda, aligning local and national priorities with global climate, biodiversity and land commitments, and offering common ground between the Global North and Global South as well as between rural and urban, left and right constituencies. It proposes that water be used as a bridge between fragmented policy arenas and a divided world, helping to re-energize stalled negotiations on the triple planetary crisis. The upcoming UN Water Conferences in 2026 and 2028, the conclusion of the International Decade for Action “Water for Sustainable Development” in 2028, and the 2030 deadline for SDG 6 are identified as critical milestones for embedding water-bankruptcy diagnostics, monitoring frameworks and justtransition support into global governance.
This UNU-INWEH report is not another warning about a crisis that might arrive in the future. It is a declaration that the world is already living beyond its hydrological means and that many human-water systems are operating in a state of water bankruptcy. Recognizing this post-crisis reality is not an act of resignation; it is the starting point for a more honest, science-based and justice-oriented agenda that uses mitigation and adaptation to build a fresh, more sustainable balance between societies and the water on which they depend — before the remaining natural capital is lost.
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