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Much of the World Facing 'Water Bankruptcy,' U.N. Report Warns
- RIMR 10mo agoIt is startling to me how much we disregard water scarcity. It seems like there's a persistent attitude that because we haven't run out of water to a dangerous degree before, it will never happen, even as the numbers suggest we are marching directly into a significant drought event. I worry that the gears of capitalism will refuse to stop turning even as we face significant mortality as a result of dehydration, because our biggest and most profitable industries rely on a mindboggling quantity of fresh water.
- baggy_trough 10mo agoIt’s a good thing that a mindbogglingly large amount of fresh water falls on us every year, for free.
- itsrobreally 10mo agoIt seems unlikely to continue if the local water table is dry
- dpc050505 10mo ago2 billion people rely on quickly melting glaciers, a lot of water tables that depend on rainfall aren't being replenished at the rate they're being emptied. You can cover your ears and ignore physics all you want. If you take out more water from an ecosystem than what is coming in, eventually you run out.
- warkdarrior 10mo ago> If you take out more water from an ecosystem than what is coming in, eventually you run out. That's fine, people will move elsewhere. Unless the water is literally disappearing from the planet.
- taberiand 10mo agoSure, and the people who live near oceans can just sell their houses and move as sea levels rise. People forced to migrate due to fresh water scarcity will migrate to where fresh water can be found, which is likely where other people already are, increasing pressure on the increasingly scarce water and other resources in that area, driving conflict, disease, famine, further migration into increasingly stressed areas and leading to social and ecological collapse across the board. Access to reliable fresh water is foundational to stable society.
- swiftcoder 10mo ago> That's fine, people will move elsewhere That's how one creates a refugee crisis. All those thirsty people fleeing an area where the lack of water has made their property worthless... They will need somewhere to go, and housing and jobs when they get there - and if they don't find it, that's when things get dicey all round.
- dpc050505 10mo agoLook at what's happening in Sri Lanka or the middle east (drought causing famine was a catalyst to the arab spring) for an example of what happens when people try to move elsewhere.
- HelloMcFly 10mo agoIs this statement a version of "actually, there isn't a problem"? Because if you're dismissing what's happening, all I can do is implore you to look into this issue with a curious and open mind.
- p1necone 10mo agoWow, you're a genius, you should call up the UN and tell them they just forgot about rain! Problem solved!
- glitchc 10mo agoWe have a virtually infinite amount of water. The oceans are full of it. When the time comes (if the time comes), we will build desalination plants at scale. So no, water will not run out, it will simply cost more to use.
- notyourwork 10mo agoIt’s easy to disregard when a bottle of water from somewhere in the world is readily available in a plastic bottle in my soda machine for a dollar. A water business is wild.
- sentrysapper 10mo agoTrying not to think about _We Stand On Guard_.
- engineer_22 10mo agoA comic book about USA invading Canada?
- footy 10mo agoover water specifically
- johnea 10mo agoWe're not "water bankrupt", we're massively over human populated! Every natural resource is under strain. Every animal and plant not serving as a revenue center for some rich prick is be pushed into extinction. But for some reason we need to grow the idiot herd, because elon needs more... Maybe if we didn't have 1 person with more wealth than 1/2 of the US population, we wouldn't have a problem paying for old people to age in relative comfort...
- elzbardico 10mo agoNo. We're not. Not even close.
- neuralRiot 10mo agoEarth can sustain current population many times over, what it cannot however is human greed and stupidity. No worries, as George Carlin said: “Save the earth! Save the earth! The earth is fine, we are the ones who are screwed.”
- johnea 10mo agoYea, the mineral globe of the earth might be fine, we probably won't change it's orbit around the sun, but every other life form on the planet WILL be in great peril. Like so much else, this assertion that earth will be fine, is total bullshit...
- api 10mo agoOther than maybe some very dry places, is this ever anything other than resource mis-management or under-investment in infrastructure?
- swiftcoder 10mo agoClimate change is also a pretty big deal in a lot of places - if you rely on a snowpack melting for water, and it doesn't snow anymore, c'est la vie
- is_true 10mo agoWhere I live there plenty of water but as it's a bit warmer algal blooms are more common. There's also an increasing amount of fertilizer that end up in the water which.makes it worse.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- jl6 10mo agoThere is likely no single or simple answer. It’s just one example of the general issue of humanity living beyond its means, filling the deficit by drawing down on resources that will not be renewed. Debt and bankruptcy is a good analogy. In a way, this is quintessential human behavior. Animals faced with shortages tend to die off until their population size matches the available resources. Humans have invented ways to postpone this fate, manipulating our environment in order to sustain a growing population. So it’s not “just” infrastructure mismanagement. Unsustainable living is practically ingrained into human nature. The challenge will be whether we can voluntarily reduce our population size or consumption to match the available resources, or whether we’ll have that reduction forced upon us.
- kazinator 10mo agoDystopian scenario: there are a heck of a lot of people in the world and they are 60% of water. Someone will realize this and people will turn on each other to extract that water. :)
- joe_mamba 10mo agoI call shotgun on riding the sandworm.
- glitchc 10mo agoThat's going to be a right bloody mess there, mate!
- hydrogen7800 10mo agoSurprisingly this is not something explored in "Dune" among the Fremen.
- cheeseomlit 10mo agoWhat do you mean? When a Fremen dies they extract all the water from their body- Paul is given the water extracted from the Fremen he killed in a duel. And when the Fremen first encounter Paul and Jessica I think one of the first things they say is basically "so why shouldnt we just kill you for your water right now?", meaning the water in their bodies
- hydrogen7800 10mo agoI mean fremen killing each other for their water. There is much made of recovering their water after death, but not of inter-sietch raids to harvest the water of conquered.
- p1mrx 10mo agoHuman bodies are a trivial fraction of the fresh water on Earth. That makes about as much sense as stealing batteries to run the power grid.
- elzbardico 10mo ago[flagged]
- notyourwork 10mo agoFor the uninformed, tell me more. Is it the density causing too much demand on the resource in a specific geographic region? Something else?
- mikkupikku 10mo agoIn some regions, such as much of the American southwest, demand for water is too high for how much water they get, they're covering the difference with fossil aquifers but those are finite and rapidly draining. Most n those regions just pretend that a solution will magically appear some day, maybe they'll somehow get other neighboring regions to pipe all their water over hundreds of miles, but that's a pipe dream. Realistically those areas are too crowded and people need to move to more ecological sensible regions.
- joe_mamba 10mo agoHuh? High density living is way more environmentally friendly than those same people living in sprawled suburban single family homes. It might not be as nicer to live, but that's another topic. Also, calling people who don't see eye to eye with you as "idiots" is a poor choice to try to make a point.
- r14c 10mo agoYeah honestly. US urban planning is unfortunately hostile by default, but cities can be dense, efficient, and pleasant if local politics allow it. Unfortunately, a lot of places will block nice things like parks and green spaces, because "the wrong kind of person" might be able to enjoy themselves a bit before or after work.
- glitchc 10mo agoHigh density almost always leads to more efficient use of resources and economies of scale. The negatives stem from the externalities due to overuse of commons (garbage, pollution, etc.). It's not that water runs out, as it can always be transported in. It's that the runoff becomes increasingly harder to manage.
- EcommerceFlow 10mo agoI see this as an energy problem. We have 'unlimited' water from the Oceans, and distillation technology exists, it's just not economically viable (enough) because of the high energy costs of distillation. Elon's solution to this is solar panels everywhere, since they're so incredibly scalable (imagine an automated solar factory). Hopefully this comes to fruition sooner rather than later.
- colechristensen 10mo agoA whole lot of it is people living in stupid places feeling entitled to continue living in a place without the resources to support them.
- EcommerceFlow 10mo agoOr we just scale up energy, allowing people to live everywhere!
- footy 10mo agoI read about how Phoenix AZ is one of (if not the) fastest growing city in the US and feel like I am losing my mind.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoHow does it rank in a list sorting states by growing solar power generation? If they'd be growing together, maybe it isn't so stupid?
- piva00 10mo agoSolar doesn't generate water in a desert far away from any sea to be desalinated.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- njhnjh 10mo agoWe should get Claude Code to invent an AGI that makes more water In the future we will do away with outdated concepts like reservoirs and water towers and simply use prompts to access all of our natural resources.
- derrida 10mo agoMy city (Sydney) is known for having a huge supply of water & the council is now talking about shortage and need for planning as they expect the data centre in 1 block to be using 25% of it because of the AI tools https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-27/ai-to-take-up-one-quarter-of-sydney-water-in-a-decade/105700928 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-27/ai-to-take-up-one-qua...
- njhnjh 10mo ago[dead]
- svilen_dobrev 10mo agoloong time ago ~2000~ i worked for company making geological software.. most customers were "digging" for oil but quite a few of the customers were digging for water.. and someone then said "future Wars will be fought for water"
- embedding-shape 10mo agoAdd "or food" and you'll have a 99% chance of being right. Probably in some future you'd need to explicitly add "or air" in there, depending on what comes next. Strikingly similar to a list of what humans absolutely need to survive.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoDesalinization is expensive, but wars are many orders of magnitude more expensive. Going to war over water rather than just creating fresh water via desalinization is supremely irrational. Of course, most wars are highly irrational...
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- 3ple_alpha 10mo agoThere are some partial solutions that are fairly simple in concept, for example those related to farming. Some of the crops grown in regions where water is less than abundant are unnecessarily water-intensive, leading to a possible strategy that can be summarised as "grow something else". In practice this means regulating farming with emphasis on water management, I often feel that many places could use more regulation in this area. Simple concept does not mean simple execution, once you start regulating things it's easy to get it wrong, but the ideas are there and are not exactly novel.
- swiftcoder 10mo agoThere are also a variety of co-planting schemes that drastically reduce water use (i.e. things like combining vegetable farming with shade trees), albeit often at the expense of making mechanical harvesting significantly more challenging.
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]