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Wherever you live, there’s a good chance you’ve faced a water crisis at some point in your life. Officials order water restrictions. Yards, fields and waterways might dry out. These can seem like temporary problems that will eventually go away.
But water crises aren’t just happening occasionally or only in very dry places.
In a new report, scientists at United Nations University warn that the world has entered an era of water bankruptcy, in which water overuse and drying conditions have left billions of people living beyond their annual water resources and drawing down their water savings.
“In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens,” writes Kaveh Madani, an environmental scientist who led the study. “Water bankruptcy has similar stages.”
Madani explains what water bankruptcy looks like in the world today, and the growing risks.
[ Science from the scientists themselves. Sign up for our weekly science email newsletter. ]
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Stacy Morford
Senior Environment, Climate and Energy Editor
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Residents waited to collect water near Cape Town, South Africa, in February 2018 as a drought pushed the city close to ‘Day Zero,’ when water supplies would run out.
Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
Kaveh Madani, United Nations University
Like living beyond your financial means, using more water than nature can replenish can have catastrophic results.
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Science + Technology
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Nicole M. Bennett, Indiana University
Federal agents have pepper-sprayed, tackled and detained people recording their actions. If you post your recordings of agents, you also risk the feds tracking you and those around you.
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André O. Hudson, Rochester Institute of Technology
Antibiotics transformed health care for the better, but their diminishing effectiveness may soon be its undoing. Researchers are studying ways to fight back against resistance.
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Health + Medicine
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Robin Pickering, Gonzaga University
Many people may call it self-care to crash on the couch with your smartphone, but screen-based activities increase the load on your brain instead of resting it.
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Environment + Energy
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Nir Kshetri, University of North Carolina – Greensboro
Artificial intelligence systems have big environmental costs but are also finding ways to save energy and water, cut emissions and make businesses more efficient.
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Hélène Nguemgaing, University of Maryland; Alan Collins, West Virginia University
Coal mines are notorious sources of acid mine drainage, but the orange sludge that threatens water supplies and wildlife also contains valuable rare earth elements.
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Education
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Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, University of California, Santa Barbara
While federal immigration agents need to produce a judicial warrant to enter a classroom, they can freely operate in public spaces at and around schools.
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Politics + Society
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Steven Lamy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
A 1951 defense agreement between the United States and Denmark allows the US to build military installations on Greenland to protect the region.
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Timothy Joseph, College of the Holy Cross
“When they make a wasteland, they call it ‘peace,‘” wrote the Roman historian Tacitus, in a turn of phrase that a classics scholar says has been relevant for centuries – including right now.
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Laurel Elder, Hartwick College; Jeff Gulati, Bentley University; Mary-Kate Lizotte, Augusta University; Steven Greene, North Carolina State University
Although she’s the world’s reigning pop star, attitudes toward Swift are split markedly along both partisan and gender lines.
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International
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Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, Tufts University
Africans everywhere should show interest in the outcome of the African Union’s elections for its human rights institutions.
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