The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health recently issued a report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, asserting that many regions are living beyond their water means and experiencing irreversible losses of natural water supplies. Explaining the situation in economic terms, the report notes that these societies are water bankrupt—persistently over-withdrawing from surface and groundwater sources relative to renewable inflows and safe levels of depletion.

Many societies have not only overused renewable water resources from rivers, soil and snowpacks, but also depleted water from aquifers, glaciers, wetlands and natural reservoirs. Water bankruptcy hot spots include regions in the Middle East and North Africa, parts of South Asia and the American Southwest along the Colorado River.

The report also found that 50 percent of the world’s large lakes have lost water since the early 1990s; 50 percent of water is pumped from underground; 410 million hectares of wetlands (the size of the European Union) have disappeared in the past five decades; more than 30 percent of glacier mass has been lost since 1970; dozens of major rivers fail to reach the sea for part of the year; and 4 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month a year.

The report’s lead author, Kaveh Madani, points out that water bankruptcy crosses national boundaries and therefore needs to be addressed and solved together globally. He stresses that an investment in water is an investment in mitigating climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification.