It feels like one of our best-kept secrets.
The water is running out. And yet we don’t seem very worried.
Perhaps one reason is that there seems to be so much of it.
To put that in perspective, less than 3% of the water on Earth is freshwater.
Earth’s natural desalination programme, the rains, turns some of the vast ocean stores into potable supply, but we force most of that into drains and oceans, by blocking natural aquifers, filling up lakes and wetlands, and encroaching on rivers.
Then the battles begin.
Countries spar over dams, regions battle over rivers.
In Mexico, drought-stricken farmers have set fire to government buildings and ambushed soldiers, to prevent water from being diverted to the US.
Violent clashes between Cameroon’s Musgum fishermen and semi-nomadic Choa Arab herders over access to water have driven thousands to migrate across the border to Chad.
Over the past 10 years, in arid and civil war-struck Yemen, violence is often concentrated around water tankers, bottling stations and wells.
Conflicts over water erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia; India and her neighbours; China and its neighbours; Turkey, Syria and Iraq; Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The list goes on.
The fear and uncertainty driving such clashes reflect a stark reality: In January, the United Nations warned that the planet has entered an era of “water bankruptcy”, a tipping point beyond which small-scale remedial measures such as better management and reduced waste will no longer meet the gap between the rate at which water is being withdrawn and the rate at which it can be replenished.
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How did we get here?
A child could answer that: we have drawn more heavily from groundwater than we should have; blocked replenishment with concrete and deforestation; put rivers at risk from massive reservoirs, and reservoirs (as well as glaciers, rivers and lakes) at risk from rising temperatures.
Perhaps the worst part of it all is that we have done this in service of two mega constructs: cities, and monoculture. Our cities waste more water than they use, while draining the regions around them. Around Beijing, this desertification has become so severe that it is causing giant dust storms that turn the sky orange.
Water is similarly wasted across most irrigation networks, and the water that does reach the farms (much of it groundwater) is used to feed crops so water-intensive, they shouldn’t be growing in the vast swathes of arid and semi-arid land where they are now planted.
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The real answer to how we got here, though, lies in the cultural shifts that made this possible.
Early food-gathering societies and settlements protected forests and water bodies because there was recognition of the direct link between these and their own survival. That’s how rivers and trees came to be viewed as sacred.
As settlements grew into kingdoms and empires, this direct bond with local resources weakened until, by the modern age, it had snapped altogether.
We no longer know where our water (or food or fuel) come from.
Meanwhile, as cities have exploded, driven by extractive capitalism, markets and margins have taken over as the things we focus effort and attention on.
The infinite-growth economy continues to depend on a natural world that cannot accommodate such a model. The result, over time, is visible in the climate crisis. Which has circled back to take its toll on water (as well as forests, monsoon systems, ocean environments and a host of other biospheres).
Human-caused global warming has made the atmosphere thirstier, sapping more moisture from the soil, and from rivers and reservoirs. Winds transport this excess water into storm systems, often far away, leading to droughts in one region and deluges in another.
“All this adds to existing challenges in managing water supply,” says Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading.
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New guzzlers, such as data centres, are now emerging. AI already uses as much water worldwide, each year, as over 4 million American households.
To address the water bankruptcy, we would need to start by rethinking water rights, water pricing and restrictions on use of water, says Kaveh Madani, a climate scientist and director of the United Nations thinktank on water, the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).
We would also need to rethink infrastructure, energy, food security. As looming as that may sound, a better way is not only possible, there are countries where small changes are already showing results. (Read the stories alongside for more on this.)
“It doesn’t help that, unlike air pollution, we do not have a simple, visible indicator of water loss,” adds Mohammad Shamsudduha, a hydrogeologist with the University College London department of risk and disaster reduction. “What we really need is better local data to make water stress more visible and actionable.”
Failing which, he adds, perhaps the significant and growing risk itself will serve as a forced catalyst to action.
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CLICK HERE to travel down the Ganga with Binayak Dasgupta, as he explores our bond with water.
READ ON to see what the crisis looks like, in some of the regions where it is most severe. And how small but coordinated efforts are driving significant change.
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IRAN: UP AGAINST THE WALL
Tehran is currently in the midst of its sixth consecutive year of extreme drought (a combination of critically low rainfall, empty reservoirs and high temperatures).
Satellite images show vast water bodies across the country shrinking into thin trickles.
About 750 km away, Urmia, once the Middle East’s largest lake, has dwindled to less than 10% its former size. From about 6,000 sq km, it now covers just 581 sq km.
Beneath the ground, the crisis runs deeper.
As Iran, like so many countries, overuses groundwater, falling levels, combined with changing rainfall patterns (the country experienced its driest autumn on record last year), extensive dam construction and evaporation from these dams, has led to the shrinking of wetlands and lakes. Adding to the problem is the prevalence of water-intensive crops such as rice and watermelon.
Things could have been different.
Over the past 70 years, Iran — again, like so many others, including India — neglected and abandoned ancient water management systems, in favour of new ideas.
In Iran’s case, the qanat or water-tunnel system had helped support the arid country for thousands of years. These sloping, covered tunnels were dug into hillsides and built along plains to channel rainwater and springwater, protecting it from the region’s harsh heat.
The country’s shift to dams, which include some of the largest in the world, brought short-term abundance but exposed tonnes of water to evaporation from temperatures that routinely cross 50 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, as in so many cities, the pipelines that distributed the reservoir water were poorly monitored, governed and maintained.
With the qanats quietly crumbling, when scarcities hit, people dug wells and tapped into groundwater instead. The vicious cycle had begun as far back as the 1950s.
Water management and agricultural reform will be the keys to the path forward, says Kaveh Madani, the Canada-based Iranian director of the United Nations thinktank on water, who also worked within the environment ministry in Iran until his views caused him to be alienated. “Modern management can learn from the Persians, whose qanats helped societies thrive in some of the driest places in the world, for thousands of years.” The very definition, he adds, of sustainable.
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USA: THE COLORADO RIVER NO LONGER MEETS THE SEA
They say: “Follow the river and it will eventually lead you to the sea”. This is no longer true in parts of the world.
For nearly 6 million years, the Colorado river flowed from the Rocky Mountains into the Gulf of California. Over the past 20 years, it has seen volumes drop by 20%, and it now runs dry almost 160 km before it reaches the sea.
Irrigation consumes more than half the river’s water, with much of this used to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. Another tenth is claimed by evaporation at dam reservoirs, with another 20% supplied to households and industries.
Meanwhile, more than half of the Western United States is currently experiencing drought conditions, following a winter of historically low snow, according to the federal drought monitoring system. As much as 75% of water supplies can come from snowmelt here, which acts as a crucial natural reservoir, as the US Geological Survey has put it in reports.
This has resulted in mandatory water restrictions across a wide swathe of the country.
In some cities, restaurant owners are being asked to serve water only if patrons ask for it. In certain regions, the watering of lawn has been restricted to no more than twice a week.
Amid a record warm winter and a March heatwave, river and stream volumes are dipping further.
“This might be what it takes to get us to truly adapt to 21st century realities,” Kyle Roerink, executive director of the advocacy group Great Basin Water Network, told The New York Times last week. “If we believe what the top scientists are saying, this isn’t the worst it’s going to get in the 21st century.”
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TURKEY: A HARVEST OF SINKHOLES
Some of the world’s first agricultural societies emerged here, about 9,500 years ago. The country now stands on the brink of an agricultural crisis.
The unchecked drilling of deep wells has caused dramatic cases of land subsidence, triggering giant sinkholes across farms, with 684 appearing just in the “bread basket” region of Konya.
Major lakes have vanished, or are shrinking rapidly.
Climate change is intensifying the crisis. The country recorded its lowest rainfall levels in 50 years, in 2025, with rainfall at 26% below the long-term average.
Turkey’s bustling mines, meanwhile, continue to use thousands of litres of water per kg of gold extracted. Mining for gold, copper, silver and manganese also releases cyanide into water bodies, poisoning them.
And agriculture, which accounts for 75% of total water consumption (according to a 2025 drought hotspots report by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification), has in many cases shifted from low-water-intensity crops such as chickpeas to guzzlers such as corn, sugarcane and avocado, because they offer higher profit margins.
Last month, the government announced a 10-year plan that focuses on stronger wastewater treatment systems, implementing digital monitoring of water resources and improving resilience to climate change.
“A clear water deficit is carrying over from one year to the next across much of the country,” Mikdat Kadioglu, a climate scientist with Istanbul Technical University, said in news interviews in February. “This signals the new normal under climate change.”
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BANGALDESH: THE DEATH OF THE PRIDE OF DHAKA
The French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, in his 1684 travelogues, wrote that Dhaka seemed to extend only in length, as “everyone coveted to have a house by the Ganges-side” (referring to the mighty Buriganga).
Today, this is a dead river. It sustains little aquatic life. Its waters are black. A foul, rotten-egg stench indicates the presence of noxious effluents.
Bangladesh-born environmental social scientist Sonia Hoque, whose 2025 book Water Diaries explores crises in Bangladesh and Kenya, says the river now contains so much hydrogen sulfide that even flecks of its water tarnish silver jewellery. The worst culprits here, adds the senior research associate with the research body Oxford Water Network, are the textile and tanning industries that release untreated waste into the river.
Elsewhere in the coastal country, rising sea levels, salinity intrusion and extreme weather events threaten other sources of freshwater, found a 2025 study published in the Ecological Indicators journal by researchers at UK’s University of Portsmouth, in partnership with Dhaka University and Australia’s Curtin University.
The biggest issue, Hoque says, is not intent or means. “The government and related agencies are ready to pour in the money. But interventions without coordination… is ultimately useless.”
WHAT DOES POSITIVE ACTION LOOK LIKE?
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IN PERU, WATER BILLS PAY FOR CHANGE
Over the past 50 years, more than half of Peru’s glaciers have melted. Rainfall in the Andes has shown significant variability, with sharp declines predicted. A 2019 World Bank report placed the national capital, Lima, at severe risk of drought by 2030.
But change, on a small scale, has begun here.
In 2014, the country decided to zoom out and find a powerful way to drive change.
A series of new laws now make it mandatory for all utility companies managing the country’s water supply to invest 3% to 5% of the money paid by citizens as water bills in nature-based solutions (NBS) such as watershed conservation (a coordinated approach that focuses on land, aquifers and vegetation).
In cities such as Moyobamba, this has helped improve the quality and reliability of water supply in regions that have seen rainforest land given over to agriculture.
So far, 49 such projects have been implemented across the country, as of 2025, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). They are being studied as an adaptation model for countries in a similar situation.
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ETHIOPIA: TWO NEW SPRINGS ARE BORN
In remote parts of rural Ethiopia, such as Adami Teso and Kumato, women and children typically spend half the day walking to the nearest pond, spring or river and back, to fetch water.
At the Kumato Health Centre, which serves more than 45,000 people, women giving birth have had to bring their own water because of the acute shortage. Diarrheal diseases are a major cause of mortality among children under five; lakhs of children are drinking water so unsafe that it is visibly dirty.
What can change look like, in such a region, in one of the poorest countries in the world?
In 2022, the research organisation World Resources Institute (WRI) partnered with the international NGO WaterAid to drive community-led projects aimed at recharging groundwater levels. Check dams were built to prevent runoff. Large tracts of land were closed off to livestock and farming to allow them to regenerate and help revive the water table.
The result was visible in three years. By 2025, groundwater levels had risen by 1.2 metres on average, across five monitored community wells, in the arid district of North Mecha. Two freshwater springs appeared on land that had held none in living memory. Inspired by the success of this project, WRI has announced a larger one in a neighbouring region.
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CHINA: A SPONGE CITY PLAN
Intense dust storms loom over Beijing regularly now, some unlike anything seen before this decade. Photos from 2023 show the sky over the country’s capital glowing an eerie orange. The government has taken to issuing warnings, to let residents know when they should avoid stepping outdoors.
A key driver is land degradation and the desertification of the surrounding region.
Elsewhere in China, cities are suffering from land subsidence as booms in urbanisation intensify the extraction of groundwater.
A 2024 national-scale assessment led by South China Normal University, published in the journal Science, found that about 67 million people now live in areas subsiding at a rate of more than 10 mm a year. Underground urban transportation systems and mining activity have intensified the issue, the report noted.
Across China’s cities, the effort for change has been nicknamed the Sponge City programme. Launched in 2015, it aims to aggressively promote rainwater harvesting and the redirection of stormwater into storage tanks, reservoirs and aquifers.
This means creating buildings such as Beijing’s National Stadium and National Aquatics Centre, made up of capillary tubes that can harvest rainwater. It also means protecting green spaces, wetlands and natural drainage systems. And there are plans to use permeable paving on streets.
On the national food front, since a large share of China’s water supply goes towards one single crop, rice, scientists are now turning to bioengineering to create drought-resistant varieties. Scientists at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences first developed “super rice” varieties tolerant to drought, floods and salinity in 2008. So far, 78 such varieties have survived lab tests and limited rollouts in the Philippines.
The preservation of water bodies has been added to the country’s five-year plans for economic and social development.
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A GLOBAL TOLL: HOW THE NUMBERS PLAY OUT
* Over 1,000
children under the age of five die every day from diseases linked to unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene. That amounts to nearly one death a minute.
* 2.2 billion
or 25% of the world’s population, do not have access to safe drinking water.
* 4 billion people
or about half the world’s population, live with severe water scarcity for at least one month a year.
* 13th
that’s India’s rank on a list of 17 of the world’s most water-stressed nations. The report cited India’s high population density: our country is home to just 4% of the world’s freshwater reserves and 18% of its people. (Qatar, incidentally, came in at #1.)
* 2 billion
people live on ground sinking, at least partly because of the pumping out of groundwater.
* 70%
of freshwater used globally goes towards agriculture;
less than 20% goes towards industry;
about 12% goes towards domestic / municipal uses.
Future calculations will need to factor in growing AI data-centre use, which has currently crossed 560 billion litres a year; or as much as over 4 million US households.
(Sources: 1. UNICEF report Triple Threat, 2023; 2. Drinking water and sanitation report by WHO and UNICEF, 2025; 3. University of Twente 2016 study published in Science Advances, cited in UN reports; 4. Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas by World Resources Institute, 2019; 5. Global water bankruptcy report by UNU-INWEH, 2026; 6. UN World Water Development Report, 2024)
