Across large parts of the world, water demand now permanently exceeds supply. This is not a temporary crisis but a condition of irreversible scarcity driven by overuse, climate change and population pressure.

The clearest sign that the human population has outrun the Earth’s ability to support us comes when key resources begin to collapse under the unrelenting pressure of our demands.

In a powerful new paper, Kaveh Madani of the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health has declared regions of the planet either water-bankrupt, or approaching bankruptcy.

Water bankruptcy, he says, is a stage beyond ‘water stress’, ‘water crisis’ or ‘water emergency’, which are the familiar descriptors of a dearth in water supplies to meet the immediate needs of a region or a megacity.

Bankruptcy occurs when demand for water permanently exceeds local supply from rivers, lakes, rainfall and groundwater. It is a time “when the crisis never ends”, Madani says.

The term “crisis” is generally understood to mean a temporary disaster inflicted by such factors as drought, flood, storm, pollution or other impact that can be resolved or will self-correct in time. A water-bankrupt nation, city or region is out of water for the long haul.

“Globally, many lakes, rivers, and wetlands have shrunk or dried up, groundwater levels have fallen, land has subsided … due to aggressive over-extraction, and desertification, biodiversity loss, wildfires, and sand and dust storms have intensified,” he says. At the same time glaciers have melted and ice storage is depleting globally.

These are they are the cumulative result of decades of human overuse of surface and groundwater resources, pushing systems beyond their limits and into perpetual failure.

The word “crisis” is thus no longer useful in describing what is happening with........

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