In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly formally recognised access to safe, clean drinking water as a human right. In 2015, the newly unveiled UN Sustainable Development Goals committed the international community to ensuring the availability of water for all. Remarkably, just over ten years later, in January this year, the UN declared that the world has entered water bankruptcy.

This is the subject of our cover feature – ‘A world of water bankruptcy’ – which assesses decades-long wrong turns involving de-regulation and profiteering. The feature also emphasises the need to challenge those proposing more and bigger data centres to speed the development of artificial intelligence. It quotes Damilola Olawuyi, Independent Expert for the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, who says that water-related legislation is failing to keep pace with technological developments and their adverse impacts on the water rights of individuals and local communities. ‘There is an urgent need for all countries to mainstream a human rights-based approach to water management and regulation to ensure that projects or infrastructure that may adversely impact water rights, as well as the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, are not approved to proceed,’ he says.

In January, upon the launch of the United Nations University (UNU) report Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, lead author Kaveh Madani, Director of the UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health, emphasised that bankruptcy isn’t the end of action. Instead, he says, ‘it is the start of a structured recovery plan: you stop the bleeding, protect essential services, restructure unsustainable claims, and invest in rebuilding.’ Madani is clear-eyed. ‘We cannot rebuild vanished glaciers or reinflate acutely compacted aquifers,’ he says. ‘But we can prevent further loss of our remaining natural capital, and redesign institutions to live within new hydrological limits.’

He emphasises four points. First, water can’t be protected if we allow the water cycle and the climate to be damaged. Second, because water’s an issue that crosses traditional political boundaries, it can become a powerful focus for cooperation and for aligning national security with international priorities. Third, investment in water is also investment in mitigating climate change. And fourth, a renewed global emphasis on water could help re-accelerate stalled negotiations and potentially re-energise halted international processes.

Read Global Insight's October-November 2026 edition