When I wrote my book The Last Drop: Solving the World’s Water Crisis, there was good reason for that sub-title: it was a crisis that still felt solvable. As dire as the situation was, in the background were the UN Sustainable Development Goals, running from 2015–2030, that were tackling it head on. Recognising that half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – lived in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, SDG 6 ‘Clean Water and Sanitation’ promised to bring that number down to zero. The goal stated it would: “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”.
Ten years in, however, and UN Water’s ‘Mid-term status report’ found that it was falling well short of target: 2.2 billion people (i.e. 1 in 4 people) still lack safe drinking water, 42% of household wastewater is not safely treated, and since 2015 (when the goal was set) global water stress has actually increased by 2.7%.
But it gets worse. The latest World Water Day played out in the shadow of major new, highly disturbing UN report titled ‘Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era’.
Our planet is now pockmarked with a growing disease. The picture below shows a sinkhole in the Konya Plain, Türkiye, representing the literal collapse of the landscape under water bankruptcy. By early 2026, 3,000 such cavernous holes now scar Türkiye’s agricultural heartland – a direct result of extracting groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it, depleting the aquifers for water-intensive crops like maize and sugar beet, and collapsing the ground above.
Pic: Land subsidence from water over-abstraction in Türkiye’s agricultural heartland. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Obruk.jpg
Much the same is happening in California, where ground levels in Central Valley have dropped by over 28 feet (8.5 m) since the 1920s. In San Joaquin Valley, land subsidence has exceeded one foot (30cm) per year since 2006, exacerbating water supply issues for one of the world’s most agriculturally productive regions. It won’t ‘productive’ when it hits water bankruptcy.
Published in January (2026) the ‘Global Water Bankruptcy’ report from the UN (technically, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health or ‘UNU-INWEH’, to give it its full name) states that “In many regions, human–water systems are already in a post-crisis state of failure.”
For decades, societies have withdrawn more water than climate and hydrology can reliably provide, drawing down not only the annual “income” of rainfall but also the “savings” stored in aquifers, glaciers, soils, wetlands, and rivers. The consequences of water bankruptcy are now visible, as in Türkiye.
In a bankrupt state, some damages are physically irreparable on human time scales: compacted aquifers, subsided deltas, extinct species and lost lakes. Whereas “Water stress” reflects high pressure that remains reversible, and “water crisis” describes acute shocks that can be overcome, by contrast “water bankruptcy” is defined by UNU-INWEH as “persistent over-withdrawal from surface and groundwater relative to renewable inflows and the resulting irreversible or prohibitively costly loss of water”.
They have the stats to back this up:
💧 50% of large lakes worldwide have lost water since the early 1990s
💧 70% of major aquifers in long-term decline
💧 410 million hectares of natural wetlands – about the size of the entire European Union – erased in the past five decades
💧 30% of global glacier mass lost since 1970
The Water Bankruptcy report explains that our legal and institutional frameworks governing water allocation were designed in “an earlier era of apparent abundance” – see for example the 20th Century need to build the Hoover Dam 726.4 foot (221.4 m) high, yet it hasn’t been full once in the 21st Century.
As in Türkiye, excessive groundwater extraction is causing significant land subsidence, as aquifers are sucked dry and the ground level above falls, like drinking milkshake through a straw. More than 6 million square kilometres has experienced subsidence this way— almost 5% of the global land area, and home to two billion people. Some cities are dropping by 25 cm a year due to unsustainably pumping the water beneath them.
The Nasa GRACE satellite missions from 2002 to 2020 measured the changes in the world’s largest aquifer systems, using subtle changes in gravitational pull as they orbited over them. They were able to show that the majority were receding faster than they were being naturally replenished. The message was – and one I have been giving in my book talks ever since: “We are using water unsustainably – we cannot sustain current levels of water use.”
The Nasa GRACE satellite missions from 2002 to 2020 show the decline in the world’s largest aquifer systems. Famiglietti, J. S. and G. Ferguson, 2021. The hidden crisis beneath our feet, Volume: 372, Issue: 6540, Pages: 344–345, DOI: (10.1126/science.abh2867)
While climate change is an obvious culprit – and rainfall patterns are indeed changing – the smoking gun is often held in human hands. Roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture. Kaveh Madani, director of the UNU-INWEH and lead author of the report, warns that “Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted, or disappearing water sources.”
Around three billion people and more than half of the world’s food production are located in areas where total water storage – including surface water, soil moisture, snow, ice, and groundwater – is already declining or unstable. As for water quality, finds the Global Water Bankruptcy report, “In many basins, pollution from untreated or inadequately treated wastewater, agricultural runoff, industrial and mining effluents, and salinization means that a growing share of water is no longer safe or economically viable for drinking, food production or ecosystems.”
This is what makes it a global problem. Evenly previously water-abundant regions come under stress, as aquifers are pumped dry and agri-business moves on to look for its next victim (and the local politicians ever willing to accept the jobs and tax-receipts). “Food systems are tightly interconnected through trade and prices”, explains Madani. “When water scarcity undermines farming in one region, the effects ripple through global markets, political stability, and food security elsewhere. This makes water bankruptcy not a series of isolated local crises, but a shared global risk that demands a new type of response: Bankruptcy management, not crisis management.”
Source UNU-INWEH Report: Madani, K. (2026). ‘Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era’. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. DOI: 10.53328/INR26KAM001
A starting point for action
Recognizing this post-crisis state of water bankruptcy is not an admission of defeat, however, but a realistic starting point for action. As the UNU-INWEH authors say, a “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.”
Rather than only asking how to avoid a water crisis (mitigation), the UNU-INWEH now asks what it means to govern human–water systems in water bankruptcy (adaptation): 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.
Despite all this, I still feel the crisis is solvable. Prevention and mitigation remain crucial. Stories recently covered in Water Matters, such as the return of beavers and the restoration of our wetlands, have already shown what is possible when we work with nature rather than against it. In the coming weeks, we will also be speaking to campaigners who are taking that fight into the public arena, including Ash Smith, whose work has begun to make national waves. Together, these stories offer not just warning, but direction. As any financial advisor or insolvency lawyer could tell you, bankruptcy isn’t the end. It’s the end of one road, sure. It’s a necessary levelling of the books. But then it’s the start of a new way forward.
Meanwhile in Türkiye‘s agricultural heartland, Dr Ece Onur has started a female-led cooperative and that trains farmers to return to traditional dry farming methods that use no groundwater pumping, instead preparing the soil and encouraging plants to grow deeper roots. “Soil is a living organism,” she told The Guardian. “The only way to solve this crisis is to stop trying to make nature do things our way. We have to imitate her ways.”
