UN report warns water overuse has driven many regions into irreversible ecological collapse.
Three-quarters of global population lives in water-insecure or critically water-insecure countries today.
Agriculture, groundwater depletion and climate extremes intensify global water bankruptcy risks worldwide.
The UN report also stated that many societies have not only overspent their annual renewable water “income” from river, soils and snowpack, they have depleted long-term “savings” in aquifers, glaciers, wetlands and other natural reservoirs. This has resulted in impacted aquifers, subsided land in deltas and coastal cities, vanished lakes, wetlands and biodiversity.
Prof Kaveh Madani of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UN INWEH), who led the report, stated in the UN INWEH news release, that while not every basin and country is water-bankrupt, “enough critical systems around the world have crossed these thresholds. These systems are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies, so the global risk landscape is now fundamentally altered.”
1 January 2026
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Billions Face Water Insecurity
The result was a world in which 75% of people lived in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure and 2bn people living on sinking ground as groundwater aquifers collapse.
Conflicts over water had risen sharply since 2010, the report stated, while major rivers, such as the Colorado, in the US, and the Murray-Darling system, in Australia, were failing to reach the sea, and “day zero” emergencies. The term “day zero” refers to moments when municipal systems are on the verge of being unable to supply piped water to most residents, as seen in widely publicised emergencies – such as in Chennai, Cape Town, Tehran and others.
More than half of the world’s large lakes have lost water since the early 1990s, affecting about one-quarter of the global population that relies on them directly, the report noted. The report indicated that even damp nations, such as the UK, were at risk because of reliance on imports of water-dependent food and other products.
“This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” said Madani. “It’s extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse,” she added.
About 70% of fresh water taken by human withdrawals was used for agriculture, but Madani asserted, “Millions 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.” Over half of global food was grown in areas where water storage was declining or unstable, the report said.
