The world has entered “an era of global water bankruptcy” with irreversible consequences, according to a new United Nations report.Regions across the world are afflicted by severe water problems: Kabul may be on course to be the first modern city to run out of water. Mexico City is sinking at a rate of around 20 inches a year as the vast aquifer beneath its streets is over-pumped. In the US Southwest, states are locked in a continual battle over the how to share the shrinking water of the drought-stricken Colorado River.The global situation is so severe that terms like “water crisis” or “water stressed” fail to capture its magnitude, according to the report published Tuesday by the United Nations University and based on a study in the journal Water Resources.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“If you keep calling this situation a crisis, you’re implying that it’s temporary. It’s a shock. We can mitigate it,” said Kaveh Madani, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, and the report’s author.With bankruptcy, while it’s still vital to fix and mitigate where possible, “you also need to adapt to a new reality… to new conditions that are more restrictive than before,” he told CNN.A girl with canisters of water from a water truck, on September 17, 2025 in Kabul, Afghanistan. The city of six million people could run out water by 2030, some experts say. – Elke Scholiers/Getty ImagesThe concept of water bankruptcy works like this: Nature provides income in the form of rain and snow, but the world is spending more than it receives — extracting from its rivers, lakes, wetlands and underground aquifers at a much faster rate than they are replenished, putting us in debt. Climate change-fueled heat and drought are compounding the problem, reducing available water.The result is shrinking rivers and lakes, dried-up wetlands, declining aquifers, crumbling land and sinkholes, the creep of desertification, a dearth of snow and melting glaciers.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe statistics in the report are stark: more than 50% of the planet’s large lakes have lost water since 1990, 70% of major aquifers are in long-term decline, an area of wetla …
