Doug Specht on how we are living in the era of global water bankruptcy, and what it means for water supplies in the UK and worldwide
Rain has drummed on British roofs every day of 2026 so far, turning fields into ponds and roads into rivers. In parts of Devon, Cornwall and Worcestershire, Met Office data show runs of 40 consecutive wet days from the end of December into February, with soils saturated and rivers flooding after even modest downpours. For many, this winter has meant sodden homes, rotted crops and collapsed road surfaces.
Enjoying this article? Check out our related reads…
Yet just as Britain endures this damp start to the year, UN scientists have declared that the world has entered an ‘era of global water bankruptcy‘, not as a distant scenario, but as a present reality for billions. Their report argues that humanity has overspent its hydrological budget, drawing down the natural ‘savings’ stored in rivers, aquifers, glaciers and wetlands faster than nature can replenish them, while pollution shrinks the share that is usable.
What ‘water bankruptcy’ really means
The UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health uses the language of finance deliberately. In its report, global water bankruptcy is defined as a persistent post-crisis state in which long-term water use and pollution have exceeded renewable inflows and safe depletion limits, and key parts of the system, aquifers, lakes, wetlands, glaciers and soils, can no longer realistically be restored to previous levels of function. Societies, in other words, have not only overspent their annual water ‘income’ in the form of rainfall and river flow, but they have also been drawing down their ‘capital’, the deep stores that buffered shocks in the past.
Around three-quarters of humanity now live in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure, unable to guarantee reliable access to safe water for all residents. Approximately 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year, as rivers run low or aquifers fall below the reach of shallow wells. About 70 per cent of major aquifers are in long-term decline; half of the world’s large lakes have lost water since the early 1990s, many through a combination of over-extraction, warming and evaporation. At the surface, climate change is amplifying extremes, swinging regions between prolonged drought and catastrophic downpours that wash away topsoil and infrastructure.
Crucially, the report stresses that water bankruptcy is not just a synonym for drought. A basin or country can suffer repeated, devastating floods, like northern Italy in 2023 or parts of the UK this winter, and still be water-bankrupt in systemic terms if, averaged over years and decades, withdrawals and pollution exceed what climate and hydrology can sustainably provide. In this sense, global water bankruptcy is less about empty reservoirs in a single bad year and more about a chronic overshoot that has eroded the natural capital that once made recovery possible.
How a wet country goes broke
On the face of it, the UK seems an unlikely candidate for water anxiety. It is, notoriously, a rainy island, with lush green hills and a climate that still feels, to many, safely temperate. But the same UN report explicitly warns that even typically wet countries are ‘not off the hook’, because of how they use water at home and how deeply they depend on water-stressed regions abroad.
Domestically, parts of England and Wales are already classified as seriously water-stressed, particularly in the southeast, where rising demand meets finite river flows and heavily tapped aquifers. Years of sewage discharges and agricultural runoff mean that even where volumes look healthy on paper, the fraction of water fit for ecosystems, bathing or drinking is far smaller. In wet winters like this one, overloaded combined sewers spill polluted water into rivers and onto floodplains, underscoring how abundance can coexist with declining quality and poorly adapted infrastructure.
Beyond its shores, the UK’s apparent security rests on what hydrologists call virtual water, the water embedded in the food, fibre and manufactured goods it imports. Virtual water turns local scarcity into a global concern. Every tonne of wheat, litre of milk or kilogram of cotton traded across borders may carry thousands of litres of water ‘hidden’ within it, the rain or irrigation that made production possible. When importing countries buy these goods, they are effectively outsourcing part of their water footprint. In principle, this can be efficient: wetter, cooler regions grow thirsty crops and export them to drier places. In practice, however, much of today’s trade draws on already stressed rivers, aquifers and soils.
Modelling of future virtual water trade suggests that without major changes in diets, crop choices and irrigation efficiency, trade could deepen stress in dry regions by locking farmers into thirsty export crops. For consumers in Europe, those dynamics appear in the news as spikes in food prices or shortages, rather than cracked riverbeds at home. But as the UN authors point out, a world in water bankruptcy is one in which no country, however rainy, can fully insulate itself from the cascading effects on food systems, migration and political stability.
From crisis management to ‘bankruptcy management’
Perhaps the report’s most provocative, and important, argument is that the world must stop treating water problems as a succession of temporary crises and instead adopt the logic of ‘bankruptcy management’. This means facing up to the fact that some losses are irreversible, and that continuing to behave as if full recovery is around the corner only deepens the damage.
Bankruptcy management, as set out by UN experts, starts with honesty: mapping which aquifers, lakes and wetlands are effectively beyond restoration, and which still have a chance if protected. On that basis, governments are urged to shift from building ever more dams, canals and emergency pipelines towards safeguarding remaining natural ‘savings’: restoring wetlands, protecting headwaters, halting deforestation in key catchments and regulating pollution more strictly. At the same time, the report calls for rebalancing rights and claims, from revising century-old river compacts to tackling illegal abstractions and bringing shadow users, from unregistered wells to informal settlements, into more transparent, negotiated arrangements.
Most politically fraught of all, bankruptcy management implies transforming water-intensive sectors, above all agriculture. That may mean shifting away from particularly thirsty crops in dry basins, investing in less wasteful irrigation, changing subsidies that encourage overuse, and, in some cases, supporting farmers to move into different livelihoods altogether. The authors argue that upcoming UN water meetings, the end of the Water Action Decade in 2028 and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals deadline should be used as turning points to elevate water within climate, food and biodiversity negotiations.
For a wet island on the Atlantic fringe, these ideas have uncomfortable implications. What would bankruptcy management look like in Britain and Europe? It might mean stricter limits on building over floodplains, re-wetting peatlands rather than draining them, changing what is grown where, and confronting the water footprints of imported food and energy.
Living within our hydrological means
As another band of rain heads for the British Isles, it is tempting to think of water scarcity as somebody else’s problem, a distant drama playing out on parched riverbeds under blazing suns. This winter’s sodden fields and overflowing drains tell a different story: of infrastructure and institutions built for a climate that no longer exists, struggling under the weight of too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The era of global water bankruptcy, as defined by UN scientists, is less about dramatic images of empty dams and more about the slow, uneven exhaustion of the systems that quietly make life possible: aquifers, lakes, wetlands, soil moisture, snowpack and the social compacts that govern their use. The UK is part of that story, as a consumer, as a trade partner, and as a country whose own rivers, wetlands and coasts are under mounting pressure.
Living within our hydrological means will require more than clever engineering. It will demand new relationships with water that recognise limits, value ecosystems as capital to be protected rather than assets to be liquidated, and share scarcity more fairly within and between societies. For a nation currently counting its rainfall in unbroken days, that may be the hardest shift of all: to see abundance and bankruptcy not as opposites, but as two sides of the same, overdrawn ledger.
