I can assure you there is plenty of water. There are floods in lots of places every year. The oceans are full of water that for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons.
The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
Oh boy, lemme tell you: water management is one of those things that's More Difficult Than It Seems.
I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue.
Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.
What are your credentials on this topic? You speak with a lot of certainty, but fail to acknowledge any nuance that would complicate you world view, such that a lot of water shortages happen also in developed and peaceful regions (as it mentioned in the article). The people without much water are not only in very poor places and warzones, unless you are specifically referring to the people dying due to lack of water.
How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)?
In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?
OP has 38K karma; some people take it as a signal of valuable contributions to HN, other people understand it's signal of throwing everything at the wall hoping something sticks.
A very efficient way to preserve large amounts of potable water for longer periods has traditionally been: glaciers in mountains. Climate change doesn't make water disappear but amplifies shortages as well as surplus. In many (previously) habitable parts of the world that change drives the price of water (and food mitigation) significant enough to render those areas uninhabitable. For example in Syria, Afghanistan and Iran this is a cause of poverty and conflict.
Filtering (from bacteria, pollution, ...) is another issue, and it also affects floods (floods are not periodic, so you have to store water, but storing water for a long term is not always safe).
Even desalination costs are not trivial in all countries.
Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
According to Wikipedia [1], the 2023 average electricity consumption in Burkina Faso was 0.14 MWh (=140 kWh) a year per person.
Then there's gravity. If your main source of water comes from the sea, you have to pull water from a lower altitude to a higher altitude, which means you are going against gravity, which means you need pumps. Other energy is required.
> Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
The energy cost of desalination is to convert sea water into freshwater. A person utilizes lots of water per day, but that water doesn't magically disappear, nor get turned back into sea water. Treating wastewater takes about 1 kwh per 1000 gallons, or about .05 kwh per person per day which is 13% of the per capita electricity consumption of Burkina Faso.
Desalination and long range transport are necessary only for what little is irrecoverably lost due to for example evaporation, and for offsetting the deficit from normal freshwater sources due to over-consumption.
I don't think UN is sounding the alarm of the planet running out of water all of a sudden, even they understand we have huge oceans that aren't going anywhere.
> for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons … pipes are relatively cheap
I live 1500km from the ocean at 1500m altitude with 3 million other people in a place that’s neither poor nor a war zone.
Ignoring the cost of pipes for a minute (which is probably not small), googling the energy required to get 250 gallons (or about 1 cubic meter) of water from there to here, I get at least 140kWh [1], assuming a straight shot and no ups and downs along the way.
If that cubic meter is distributed to 5 households per day (so ~30kWh / household), which is less water than the average household uses [2] but might be reasonable for drinking water needs, we’d still probably be doubling the energy requirement for the entire region from ~30kWh per household [3] to ~60kWh. And the current ~30kWh usage is somewhat elastic and reducible, where the energy to pump water is not.
A core piece of wisdom in chemical engineering is that anything is possible with sufficient energy. Fresh water being available in any particular part of the globe is the kind of classic thermal (read: energy) and mass transport problem that chemical engineering is all about.
Increasing energy production buys a lot of optionality when solving these kinds of physical world problems. It allows you to solve problems by throwing energy at them. It may not always be the most theoretically efficient solution, like throwing hardware at software performance problems, but it may be the only practical solution.
For this reason, it makes sense to build as much power generation capacity as possible even it isn't entirely clear what it will be used for. The inability of the developed world to massively scale power generation is the true environmental failure but people don't grok second-order effects.
If you have references for these I would appreciate what you can find.
In general I believe abundance of resources exist in modern society and that there is less and less consideration for the lives of others, not in the "generational trauma" sense, but in the real basics of food, water and shelter.
A lot of people point to hard problems such as the "food miles problem"[1] but are, in many cases, conflicts that drive scarcity for one purpose or another.
5-10 kWh per cubic meter pumped to Riyadh makes sense if you include the older process which requires oil to be burned to heat water first. Per capita, maybe Nicaragua can afford that. There are 65 countries poorer than Nicaragua.
The problem is that while there is a lot of water available, more than our needs, we do not use water efficiently. In particular, food production is horribly wasteful with water. Even small farms will dump 100s of gallons of water per minute (yes minute) onto the ground to ultimately be washed away or evaporated.
What that means is that the piping to get enough water everywhere is enormous. The global usage was 2 quadrillion gallons of water. [1]
There are ways to use water much much more efficiently, but they are expensive to implement. Hydroponics can grow a lot of food, but it requires a lot of power and infrastructure to get setup.
Yes 250 gallons can save a lot of people from dying of thirst but have you considered that with that same 5kwh we can also produce 1 tiktok ai slop video of the queen boxing with mike tyson?
Before commenting water is cheap and plentiful please read the proposed definition.
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
Yeah but that definition is a deformation of what bankrupcy means for a business, and the use of the word bankrupcy is more alarmist than its "proposed definition".
"irreversible damage to nature" is vague. Is a dam causing irreversible damage to nature? It sure is. Can it solve a lack of water in the dry season, of course it can.
People are more ready to build dams and damage nature than to starve.
The whole notion of bankrupcy is unclear, and making headlines with alarmist claims that are not really felt on the ground is just going to make people cringe.
So when you read "water bankruptcy", you assumed it meant a legal process where the world can apply to a court to have its water debt annulled and start again?
I find this other article [1] more informative, including for instance the global map of Vulnerability to Water-Related Challenges taken from the actual report [2].
In a large city in southern India, our house would get water supplied one day of the week during summers. Our small one bedroom flat had barrels of water drums stored inside the house. We even had one in the bedroom.
I was 14 and I would go down to the street to fetch ground water and fill those barrels up. This was in 2014.
The reality is usually less dramatic than "water completely gone" but more chronically exhausting.
For a sub-Saharan family, "severe water scarcity" often means:
Daily life shifts
Wells and water points yield less or run dry. Wait times at functioning sources grow from minutes to hours. Walking distances to water double or triple. Water quality drops as everyone crowds the remaining sources.
Who carries the burden
Mostly women and girls. During dry season, water collection can expand from one hour daily to four to six hours. Girls miss school, women lose time for farming or income generation.
Practical consequences
Washing, cooking, hygiene get rationed. Livestock often gets priority because it's the livelihood. Latrine hygiene suffers, raising disease risk. Conflicts at water points increase.
What "one month per year" obscures
The statistic sounds manageable, but that month typically falls during dry season when harvests also fail and food gets scarce. The effects compound.
Water rarely just "cuts off" - it's more of a grinding struggle over a shrinking resource, where the poorest have to walk furthest.
imagine a camping trip or a long hike and you didn't bring even remotely enough water; your shoes are extremely uncomfortable and your clothes are all soaked and dirty and you are constantly itching; heat, stress, kids, sickness, waiting lines, the crowds, noise, air pollution ...
but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".
you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...
and did I mention the smell?
now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.
I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Quebec, Canada, we had a very dry summer in 2025 and some farmers had to bring literal truckloads of water to their farm for their animals to stay alive. I remember that they were saying to the press that the cost it incurred made them lose a lot of money, making these animals net negative for them, budget wise.
This year was an exception, I'm guessing it's going to become the norm. So, much higher food prices.
Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for evaporative cooling. What part is nonsense?
If the data center is built somewhere with ample water supplies this isn't an issue. If it's pulling from groundwater this can be a huge issue. Groundwater isn't infinite and is being depleted in many areas.
The water used by data centers are either closed loop, meaning that they recirculate a set amount of water.. or the water evaporates, and my understandingis they don't use potable water for those systems. I might be wrong, but I don't think data centers aren't destroying potable water.
The water is reutilized, a big reason is the difficuty to filter new incoming water because of impurities and uncertainty about quality (e.g. winter times make the river water very muddy and difficult to filter).
Second because is because adding water is a cost, whereas reuse existing water is simpler and saves money. There are always losses of water, however these are neglectible.
Not mentioned here but for more extreme cases of devices cooling is done with distilled water (zero minerals) and the whole device works submerged under this water, the hot water isn't thrown away because it distilled water takes a lot of effort to remove the minerals and effort to keep them out, so the closed loop is very efficient.
Here's one in Oregon from today's San Francisco newspaper. If they recycle, it's still loses enough equivalent to 4000 people a year. Maybe that's worth it, but it reads like it's not enough for their future plans. It's not like the city population in question has changed that much historically so there's some future expansion of something planned. That water sounds very pristine since they are going to have to take over national park land.
https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/mount-hood-wat...
UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Sedimentation and low filling levels, hence increasing costs. Also
We found that 93% of studied reservoirs have not been fully filled up at least once during 2010–2022. Our analyses revealed that droughts are the most probable culprits. About 86% of the 398 reservoirs with accessible SPEI data exhibited significant susceptibility to drought, while 43% of the 525 reservoirs demonstrated notable sensitivity to ENSO events.
Not sure the choice of the word "bankruptcy" is meaningful. "Bankruptcy" is short for "bankruptcy protection", where an insolvent debtor tells a court they have no way of paying back all their current debts with whatever assets they have, and the court deals with the creditors and restructures all those debts in an equitable way (according to the law), so the debtors liability is limited. This is one of the cornerstones of capitalism, the limited liability concept.
When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.
I enjoy running these kind of articles through an analysis using chatgpt. Language matters and this is a pretty terribly slanted article trying to hype up fear.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.
The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
It's only a pollutant until you leave it out in the sun for a few days, after which all of the water has evaporated back into the atmosphere and you're left with mostly sodium chloride, but also a few other healthy micronutrients like potassium, magnesium, and calcium.
This process costs $0, requires zero energy (besides that provided by the sun) and has worked reliably for many thousands of years.
Call me crazy, but I'd make the case that humans should settle in places with nearby freshwater, rather than deserts, and should avoid widespread cultural acceptance of defecating and throwing trash into what would otherwise be freshwater rivers.
I can assure you there is plenty of water. There are floods in lots of places every year. The oceans are full of water that for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons.
The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
Oh boy, lemme tell you: water management is one of those things that's More Difficult Than It Seems.
I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue.
Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.
Indeed, it's easy to overestimate the capacity of a large tube and underestimate that of a small river.
7 replies →
What are your credentials on this topic? You speak with a lot of certainty, but fail to acknowledge any nuance that would complicate you world view, such that a lot of water shortages happen also in developed and peaceful regions (as it mentioned in the article). The people without much water are not only in very poor places and warzones, unless you are specifically referring to the people dying due to lack of water.
How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)?
In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?
> What are your credentials on this topic?
OP has 38K karma; some people take it as a signal of valuable contributions to HN, other people understand it's signal of throwing everything at the wall hoping something sticks.
1 reply →
A very efficient way to preserve large amounts of potable water for longer periods has traditionally been: glaciers in mountains. Climate change doesn't make water disappear but amplifies shortages as well as surplus. In many (previously) habitable parts of the world that change drives the price of water (and food mitigation) significant enough to render those areas uninhabitable. For example in Syria, Afghanistan and Iran this is a cause of poverty and conflict.
It's not just pipes.
Filtering (from bacteria, pollution, ...) is another issue, and it also affects floods (floods are not periodic, so you have to store water, but storing water for a long term is not always safe).
Even desalination costs are not trivial in all countries.
Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
According to Wikipedia [1], the 2023 average electricity consumption in Burkina Faso was 0.14 MWh (=140 kWh) a year per person.
Then there's gravity. If your main source of water comes from the sea, you have to pull water from a lower altitude to a higher altitude, which means you are going against gravity, which means you need pumps. Other energy is required.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
> Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
The energy cost of desalination is to convert sea water into freshwater. A person utilizes lots of water per day, but that water doesn't magically disappear, nor get turned back into sea water. Treating wastewater takes about 1 kwh per 1000 gallons, or about .05 kwh per person per day which is 13% of the per capita electricity consumption of Burkina Faso.
Desalination and long range transport are necessary only for what little is irrecoverably lost due to for example evaporation, and for offsetting the deficit from normal freshwater sources due to over-consumption.
I don't think UN is sounding the alarm of the planet running out of water all of a sudden, even they understand we have huge oceans that aren't going anywhere.
The report itself (https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...) does actually talk about a lot of the background, why's and how we can start addressing it, in a very fleshed out form + an executive summary at page 13.
He's also not saying the world is running out of water or clean drinking water... etc.
> for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons … pipes are relatively cheap
I live 1500km from the ocean at 1500m altitude with 3 million other people in a place that’s neither poor nor a war zone.
Ignoring the cost of pipes for a minute (which is probably not small), googling the energy required to get 250 gallons (or about 1 cubic meter) of water from there to here, I get at least 140kWh [1], assuming a straight shot and no ups and downs along the way.
If that cubic meter is distributed to 5 households per day (so ~30kWh / household), which is less water than the average household uses [2] but might be reasonable for drinking water needs, we’d still probably be doubling the energy requirement for the entire region from ~30kWh per household [3] to ~60kWh. And the current ~30kWh usage is somewhat elastic and reducible, where the energy to pump water is not.
[1] (my calculation: large pipeline, 112MJ * 3<altitude> * 1.5<distance> ~= 140kWh) https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-would-it-cost-to-pump-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
A core piece of wisdom in chemical engineering is that anything is possible with sufficient energy. Fresh water being available in any particular part of the globe is the kind of classic thermal (read: energy) and mass transport problem that chemical engineering is all about.
Increasing energy production buys a lot of optionality when solving these kinds of physical world problems. It allows you to solve problems by throwing energy at them. It may not always be the most theoretically efficient solution, like throwing hardware at software performance problems, but it may be the only practical solution.
For this reason, it makes sense to build as much power generation capacity as possible even it isn't entirely clear what it will be used for. The inability of the developed world to massively scale power generation is the true environmental failure but people don't grok second-order effects.
There are also impediments to the economically rational allocation of water. Look at California for a prime example of this.
theres no drought in california.
if we wanted to tomorrow we could stop it.
its like complaining you are sweaty after working out
12 replies →
The onion echoes your sentiments: https://theonion.com/report-every-place-on-earth-has-wrong-a...
They actually scooped the UN by over a year :)
If you have references for these I would appreciate what you can find.
In general I believe abundance of resources exist in modern society and that there is less and less consideration for the lives of others, not in the "generational trauma" sense, but in the real basics of food, water and shelter.
A lot of people point to hard problems such as the "food miles problem"[1] but are, in many cases, conflicts that drive scarcity for one purpose or another.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles
5-10 kWh per cubic meter pumped to Riyadh makes sense if you include the older process which requires oil to be burned to heat water first. Per capita, maybe Nicaragua can afford that. There are 65 countries poorer than Nicaragua.
It's as if they choose the word bankruptcy for a reason.
The problem is that while there is a lot of water available, more than our needs, we do not use water efficiently. In particular, food production is horribly wasteful with water. Even small farms will dump 100s of gallons of water per minute (yes minute) onto the ground to ultimately be washed away or evaporated.
What that means is that the piping to get enough water everywhere is enormous. The global usage was 2 quadrillion gallons of water. [1]
There are ways to use water much much more efficiently, but they are expensive to implement. Hydroponics can grow a lot of food, but it requires a lot of power and infrastructure to get setup.
[1] https://www.htt.io/learning-center/water-usage-in-the-agricu...
It's fun that desalination is always the first thing to pop up as an answer to that, and never water usage reduction
I assured you that water usage can be mismanaged even with plenty of pipes and water infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia has an incredible water piping system because they are rich. The poor cannot do that.
Saudi Arabia uses more than half of the petrol they extract on desalination.
It's not sustainable and once it runs out, the country will go back to being a poor desert.
7 replies →
Same with food. Plenty of food, just not where its needed.
well for food, its that "where its needed" is somewhere really specific: Plenty of food, just not paid for.
> But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places
Hmm... I wonder why those places are poor.
> But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
Once you start moving water uphill, it becomes vastly more expensive. It takes a lot of power to move water uphill.
Sorry but you have not done the math on the energy costs too pump water from the ocean.
Why on earth is this the top post?
In other words: a crisis.
Yes 250 gallons can save a lot of people from dying of thirst but have you considered that with that same 5kwh we can also produce 1 tiktok ai slop video of the queen boxing with mike tyson?
Salt is engineers' kryotonite.
Before commenting water is cheap and plentiful please read the proposed definition.
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
Yeah but that definition is a deformation of what bankrupcy means for a business, and the use of the word bankrupcy is more alarmist than its "proposed definition".
"irreversible damage to nature" is vague. Is a dam causing irreversible damage to nature? It sure is. Can it solve a lack of water in the dry season, of course it can.
People are more ready to build dams and damage nature than to starve.
The whole notion of bankrupcy is unclear, and making headlines with alarmist claims that are not really felt on the ground is just going to make people cringe.
Anything is true if you define the terms contrary to their meaning.
So when you read "water bankruptcy", you assumed it meant a legal process where the world can apply to a court to have its water debt annulled and start again?
2 replies →
wait, is that why "humanity" redefines and reinterprets words and meanings all the time?
Good thing that isn't what happened with this sensible definition. What part of that definition do you object to?
I find this other article [1] more informative, including for instance the global map of Vulnerability to Water-Related Challenges taken from the actual report [2].
[1] https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/our-world-is-entering-...
[2] https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...
Four billion people face severe water scarcity for at least one month each year
Does anyone know what this looks like for typical cases? The water just cuts off for a month in some places I guess?
In a large city in southern India, our house would get water supplied one day of the week during summers. Our small one bedroom flat had barrels of water drums stored inside the house. We even had one in the bedroom.
I was 14 and I would go down to the street to fetch ground water and fill those barrels up. This was in 2014.
The reality is usually less dramatic than "water completely gone" but more chronically exhausting.
For a sub-Saharan family, "severe water scarcity" often means:
Daily life shifts
Wells and water points yield less or run dry. Wait times at functioning sources grow from minutes to hours. Walking distances to water double or triple. Water quality drops as everyone crowds the remaining sources.
Who carries the burden Mostly women and girls. During dry season, water collection can expand from one hour daily to four to six hours. Girls miss school, women lose time for farming or income generation.
Practical consequences
Washing, cooking, hygiene get rationed. Livestock often gets priority because it's the livelihood. Latrine hygiene suffers, raising disease risk. Conflicts at water points increase.
What "one month per year" obscures
The statistic sounds manageable, but that month typically falls during dry season when harvests also fail and food gets scarce. The effects compound.
Water rarely just "cuts off" - it's more of a grinding struggle over a shrinking resource, where the poorest have to walk furthest.
Edit: Formatting
imagine a camping trip or a long hike and you didn't bring even remotely enough water; your shoes are extremely uncomfortable and your clothes are all soaked and dirty and you are constantly itching; heat, stress, kids, sickness, waiting lines, the crowds, noise, air pollution ...
but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".
you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...
and did I mention the smell?
now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.
I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
Probably something like having water for a few hours a day.
And being told to restrict showers, not to water lawns, etc
2 replies →
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Quebec, Canada, we had a very dry summer in 2025 and some farmers had to bring literal truckloads of water to their farm for their animals to stay alive. I remember that they were saying to the press that the cost it incurred made them lose a lot of money, making these animals net negative for them, budget wise.
This year was an exception, I'm guessing it's going to become the norm. So, much higher food prices.
Probably seasonal?
Down with lawns!
Our least tasty crop!
Reminds me of what's happening in Tehran, where they might have to relocate the capital due to severe, chronic mismanagement of their water supply.
Sounds like a bunch of useless scare mongering.
Large scale Desalination is getting increasingly achievable: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-w...
And all these huge new data centers are gonna make things worse: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
The idea that data centers are huge water hogs is nonsense.
Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for evaporative cooling. What part is nonsense?
If the data center is built somewhere with ample water supplies this isn't an issue. If it's pulling from groundwater this can be a huge issue. Groundwater isn't infinite and is being depleted in many areas.
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The water used by data centers are either closed loop, meaning that they recirculate a set amount of water.. or the water evaporates, and my understandingis they don't use potable water for those systems. I might be wrong, but I don't think data centers aren't destroying potable water.
The water is reutilized, a big reason is the difficuty to filter new incoming water because of impurities and uncertainty about quality (e.g. winter times make the river water very muddy and difficult to filter).
Second because is because adding water is a cost, whereas reuse existing water is simpler and saves money. There are always losses of water, however these are neglectible.
Not mentioned here but for more extreme cases of devices cooling is done with distilled water (zero minerals) and the whole device works submerged under this water, the hot water isn't thrown away because it distilled water takes a lot of effort to remove the minerals and effort to keep them out, so the closed loop is very efficient.
Here's one in Oregon from today's San Francisco newspaper. If they recycle, it's still loses enough equivalent to 4000 people a year. Maybe that's worth it, but it reads like it's not enough for their future plans. It's not like the city population in question has changed that much historically so there's some future expansion of something planned. That water sounds very pristine since they are going to have to take over national park land. https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/mount-hood-wat...
Microsoft is piloting new zero water cooled datacenters in some locations https://www.axios.com/local/des-moines/2026/01/16/microsoft-...?
Hopefully this can be the new standard.
yes, yes, AI bad.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dy-x!,w_1272,c_limit...
has Iran tried not to farm pistachios and watermelon in drought areas?
California farms alfalafa in drought areas. Also, the article is about water bancrupcy worldwide.
UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Sedimentation and low filling levels, hence increasing costs. Also
We found that 93% of studied reservoirs have not been fully filled up at least once during 2010–2022. Our analyses revealed that droughts are the most probable culprits. About 86% of the 398 reservoirs with accessible SPEI data exhibited significant susceptibility to drought, while 43% of the 525 reservoirs demonstrated notable sensitivity to ENSO events.
Worth a read: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Counrterpoint… israel
Not sure the choice of the word "bankruptcy" is meaningful. "Bankruptcy" is short for "bankruptcy protection", where an insolvent debtor tells a court they have no way of paying back all their current debts with whatever assets they have, and the court deals with the creditors and restructures all those debts in an equitable way (according to the law), so the debtors liability is limited. This is one of the cornerstones of capitalism, the limited liability concept.
When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696347
Nobody believes UN.
I enjoy running these kind of articles through an analysis using chatgpt. Language matters and this is a pretty terribly slanted article trying to hype up fear.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.
The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
I would no say the "world", but areas of it has as noted. Like South Asia, SW N America, N Africa and Spain.
For many of these areas, desalination could meet the gap, but someone will need to pay for it. That is the main issue, no one wants to pay.
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> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
Isn't there still a problem that desalination produces brine, which is a pollutant?
It's only a pollutant until you leave it out in the sun for a few days, after which all of the water has evaporated back into the atmosphere and you're left with mostly sodium chloride, but also a few other healthy micronutrients like potassium, magnesium, and calcium.
This process costs $0, requires zero energy (besides that provided by the sun) and has worked reliably for many thousands of years.
Lol... really? Are you as a poor Iraqi villager able to make use of this information when you need water? Or poor Indian person?
Call me crazy, but I'd make the case that humans should settle in places with nearby freshwater, rather than deserts, and should avoid widespread cultural acceptance of defecating and throwing trash into what would otherwise be freshwater rivers.
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That sounds more like isolated pockets of water bankruptcy than global water bankruptcy
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What a strange response. What would be the reason to tell a respected body to shut up?