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The world has entered "an era of global water bankruptcy" with irreversible consequences, according to a new United Nations report.
Regions across the world are afflicted by severe water problems: Kabul may be on course to be the first modern city to run out of water. Mexico City is sinking at a rate of around 20 inches a year as the vast aquifer beneath its streets is over-pumped. In the US Southwest, states are locked in a continual battle over how to share the shrinking water of the drought-stricken Colorado River.
"If you keep calling this situation a crisis, you're implying that it's temporary. It's a shock. We can mitigate it," said Kaveh Madani, director of the UN University's Institute for Water, Environment and Health, and the report's author.
With bankruptcy, while it's still vital to fix and mitigate where possible, "you also need to adapt to a new reality… to new conditions that are more restrictive than before," he told CNN.
The statistics in the report are stark: more than 50% of the planet's large lakes have lost water since 1990, 70% of major aquifers are in long-term decline, an area of wetlands almost the size of the European Union has been erased over the past 50 years, and glaciers have shrunk 30% since 1970. Even in places where water systems are less strained, pollution is reducing the amount available for drinking.
"Many regions are living beyond their hydrological means" and it's impossible now to return to conditions that used to exist, Madani said.
It brings human consequences: nearly 4 billion people face water scarcity for at least one month every year.
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📷: Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images; Elke Scholiers/Getty Images; Kevin Carter/Getty Images; Morteza Aminoroayayi/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images
