Much of the World Facing 'Water Bankruptcy,' U.N. Report Warns

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/water-bankruptcy-report

30•speckx•1h ago

Comments

RIMR•53m ago

It is startling to me how much we disregard water scarcity. It seems like there's a persistent attitude that because we haven't run out of water to a dangerous degree before, it will never happen, even as the numbers suggest we are marching directly into a significant drought event.

I worry that the gears of capitalism will refuse to stop turning even as we face significant mortality as a result of dehydration, because our biggest and most profitable industries rely on a mindboggling quantity of fresh water.

baggy_trough•49m ago

It’s a good thing that a mindbogglingly large amount of fresh water falls on us every year, for free.

itsrobreally•47m ago

It seems unlikely to continue if the local water table is dry

dpc050505•44m ago

2 billion people rely on quickly melting glaciers, a lot of water tables that depend on rainfall aren't being replenished at the rate they're being emptied.

You can cover your ears and ignore physics all you want. If you take out more water from an ecosystem than what is coming in, eventually you run out.

warkdarrior•31m ago

> If you take out more water from an ecosystem than what is coming in, eventually you run out.

That's fine, people will move elsewhere. Unless the water is literally disappearing from the planet.

taberiand•21m ago

Sure, and the people who live near oceans can just sell their houses and move as sea levels rise.

People forced to migrate due to fresh water scarcity will migrate to where fresh water can be found, which is likely where other people already are, increasing pressure on the increasingly scarce water and other resources in that area, driving conflict, disease, famine, further migration into increasingly stressed areas and leading to social and ecological collapse across the board.

Access to reliable fresh water is foundational to stable society.

HelloMcFly•30m ago

Is this statement a version of "actually, there isn't a problem"? Because if you're dismissing what's happening, all I can do is implore you to look into this issue with a curious and open mind.

p1necone•30m ago

Wow, you're a genius, you should call up the UN and tell them they just forgot about rain! Problem solved!

glitchc•25m ago

We have a virtually infinite amount of water. The oceans are full of it. When the time comes (if the time comes), we will build desalination plants at scale.

So no, water will not run out, it will simply cost more to use.

notyourwork•24m ago

It’s easy to disregard when a bottle of water from somewhere in the world is readily available in a plastic bottle in my soda machine for a dollar. A water business is wild.

sentrysapper•39m ago

Trying not to think about _We Stand On Guard_.

engineer_22•33m ago

A comic book about USA invading Canada?

footy•33m ago

over water specifically

johnea•38m ago

We're not "water bankrupt", we're massively over human populated!

Every natural resource is under strain. Every animal and plant not serving as a revenue center for some rich prick is be pushed into extinction.

But for some reason we need to grow the idiot herd, because elon needs more...

Maybe if we didn't have 1 person with more wealth than 1/2 of the US population, we wouldn't have a problem paying for old people to age in relative comfort...

elzbardico•32m ago

No. We're not. Not even close.

api•37m ago

Other than maybe some very dry places, is this ever anything other than resource mis-management or under-investment in infrastructure?

swiftcoder•32m ago

Climate change is also a pretty big deal in a lot of places - if you rely on a snowpack melting for water, and it doesn't snow anymore, c'est la vie

is_true•26m ago

Where I live there plenty of water but as it's a bit warmer algal blooms are more common. There's also an increasing amount of fertilizer that end up in the water which.makes it worse.

jl6•24m ago

There is likely no single or simple answer. It’s just one example of the general issue of humanity living beyond its means, filling the deficit by drawing down on resources that will not be renewed. Debt and bankruptcy is a good analogy.

In a way, this is quintessential human behavior. Animals faced with shortages tend to die off until their population size matches the available resources. Humans have invented ways to postpone this fate, manipulating our environment in order to sustain a growing population.

So it’s not “just” infrastructure mismanagement. Unsustainable living is practically ingrained into human nature.

The challenge will be whether we can voluntarily reduce our population size or consumption to match the available resources, or whether we’ll have that reduction forced upon us.

coryrc•13m ago

Perhaps the housing market is manipulated exactly for the purpose of reducing USA population size.

engineer_22•17m ago

If we could put ourselves in the shoes of the people in charge in these places. We'll probably all agree we as the Government have a vested interest in maintaining social stability. One key to this is maintaining access to potable water. Sick and diseased people won't rebel, but they'll be unable to carry out ordinary functions, you'll be vulnerable to outside forces. In periods of drought access to food is affected, the population might get restless, again, we'll be happier if they're placid so let's make sure water is available. If we know our water system is threatened we'll use any method available to ensure access to water is not interrupted. Seek advice of a soothe-sayer, sacrifice to the gods, take IMF loans, go to war with a neighbor. If none of these things is successful, the situation is dire. The people will become dissatisfied, if they organize and obtain weapons we could see violence. At worst we could lose our heads, or at best flee to a wealthy country but leave behind our power. Therefore, we'll appoint our best people to manage and maintain our water system.

coryrc•14m ago

Washington State (and California?) gets its summer water from snowpack, not rainfall. If there's no snowpack, then we'd need massively larger reservoirs to hold water. I think it's more nuanced than "mis-management or under-investment".

kazinator•35m ago

Dystopian scenario: there are a heck of a lot of people in the world and they are 60% of water. Someone will realize this and people will turn on each other to extract that water. :)

joe_mamba•22m ago

I call shotgun on riding the sandworm.

glitchc•21m ago

That's going to be a right bloody mess there, mate!

hydrogen7800•18m ago

Surprisingly this is not something explored in "Dune" among the Fremen.

cheeseomlit•3m ago

What do you mean? When a Fremen dies they extract all the water from their body- Paul is given the water extracted from the Fremen he killed in a duel. And when the Fremen first encounter Paul and Jessica I think one of the first things they say is basically "so why shouldnt we just kill you for your water right now?", meaning the water in their bodies

elzbardico•30m ago

Urban concentration and high density is a big issue, but for some reason, a lot of idiots think big cities are sustainable.

notyourwork•25m ago

For the uninformed, tell me more. Is it the density causing too much demand on the resource in a specific geographic region? Something else?

mikkupikku•11m ago

In some regions, such as much of the American southwest, demand for water is too high for how much water they get, they're covering the difference with fossil aquifers but those are finite and rapidly draining. Most n those regions just pretend that a solution will magically appear some day, maybe they'll somehow get other neighboring regions to pipe all their water over hundreds of miles, but that's a pipe dream. Realistically those areas are too crowded and people need to move to more ecological sensible regions.

joe_mamba•22m ago

Huh? High density living is way more environmentally friendly than those same people living in sprawled suburban single family homes. It might not be as nicer to live, but that's another topic.

r14c•18m ago

Yeah honestly. US urban planning is unfortunately hostile by default, but cities can be dense, efficient, and pleasant if local politics allow it. Unfortunately, a lot of places will block nice things like parks and green spaces, because "the wrong kind of person" might be able to enjoy themselves a bit before or after work.

glitchc•22m ago

High density almost always leads to more efficient use of resources and economies of scale. The negatives stem from the externalities due to overuse of commons (garbage, pollution, etc.). It's not that water runs out, as it can always be transported in. It's that the runoff becomes increasingly harder to manage.

r14c•21m ago

Cities are efficient and naturally occurring. I think you might be thinking of suburbs. The US has really stupid urban planning, but that says more about how we run things here than it does about cities imo

ecshafer•18m ago

Urban areas conserve far more resources than suburban or rural per person. They also use less land per person, allowing more land to be used for natural processes and agriculture. Imagine if all 30 million people in Shanghai moved to the suburbs of NYC in a .5 acre house, and started watering their lawns.

mikkupikku•16m ago

Water is a local/regional issue. Some big cities are in retarded locations and obviously aren't sustainable. Others are perfectly fine.

lynx97•3m ago

Fascinating. After 40 years, public transport is still as bad as it used to be when I grew up in a small village. These days, everyone is talking about climate change, but I still couldn't get my daily groceries if I were still living there. The city is the only way for me to move about without owning a car, yet... excuse my language... a lot of idiots still think big cities are not sustainable.

EcommerceFlow•26m ago

I see this as an energy problem. We have 'unlimited' water from the Oceans, and distillation technology exists, it's just not economically viable (enough) because of the high energy costs of distillation. Elon's solution to this is solar panels everywhere, since they're so incredibly scalable (imagine an automated solar factory). Hopefully this comes to fruition sooner rather than later.

colechristensen•23m ago

A whole lot of it is people living in stupid places feeling entitled to continue living in a place without the resources to support them.

EcommerceFlow•22m ago

Or we just scale up energy, allowing people to live everywhere!

footy•22m ago

I read about how Phoenix AZ is one of (if not the) fastest growing city in the US and feel like I am losing my mind.

embedding-shape•21m ago

How does it rank in a list sorting states by growing solar power generation? If they'd be growing together, maybe it isn't so stupid?

spwa4•19m ago

I think you'll find that while those locations are bad, they don't compare to places in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Jordan. There are places easily 100x worse.

coryrc•8m ago

Far more fossil fuel is burned in Northern climates (needlessly!) for winter heating than is done for just living in the Southern climates, including A/C.

schmichael•6m ago

> feeling entitled to continue living in a place

Are you suggesting people are not entitled to live on land they own and should be forced to relocate? Since you've made their land worthless, how are they paying for this new place to live?

I heard a water district manager for a southwestern US city once say: "it's easier to move water than people." What if we adapted your statement for what the law actually allows?

> A whole lot of it is water being in stupid places feeling entitled to continue being in a place without the people nearby to drink it.

This implies we should move water to where people need it which is both legal and reflects reality even if it sounds very silly. Physics is even on our side here: water is deposited as snow on mountains where there are few people. It flows downward under the force of gravity to where people actually live. It's a pretty nice natural system to take advantage of!

The details here matter a lot: should we socialize the costs of moving water among people who do not directly need that water? Should people in Seattle pay for people in Yakima to get water? Irrigating dry unpopulated areas is a great way to produce food that is uneconomical to produce in or near cities!

Water management is a complex problem since it's needed for sustaining not just people, but the food people eat. There's no easy switch to flip here and just solve the thing.

glemion43•17m ago

Ah yes it is the magic idea of the master mind Elon musk.

The guy who says the earth is not rescueable and therefore needs mars.

Let's just ignore what it really means okay?

It means relocating millions because a few pull out billions of liter for selling as water bottles, for industry while sending back the waste or growing crops in the a dessert.

And you do know how much musk loves poor people right? After all doge and usaid right?

coryrc•9m ago

In California the problem is irrigating water-hungry cattle feed (alfalfa) in the desert. That just grows in the Midwest from rain. But "water rights" means they don't have to pay market price for water, so they waste it on alfalfa because it's a slightly better deal for them.

svilen_dobrev•25m ago

loong time ago ~2000~ i worked for company making geological software.. most customers were "digging" for oil but quite a few of the customers were digging for water..

and someone then said "future Wars will be fought for water"

embedding-shape•21m ago

Add "or food" and you'll have a 99% chance of being right. Probably in some future you'd need to explicitly add "or air" in there, depending on what comes next. Strikingly similar to a list of what humans absolutely need to survive.

njhnjh•20m ago

We should get Claude Code to invent an AGI that makes more water

In the future we will do away with outdated concepts like reservoirs and water towers and simply use prompts to access all of our natural resources.

derrida•14m ago

My city (Sydney) is known for having a huge supply of water & the council is now talking about shortage and need for planning as they expect the data centre in 1 block to be using 25% of it because of the AI tools https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-27/ai-to-take-up-one-qua...

njhnjh•13m ago

That's a small price to pay for the transhuman glory of AGI

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