Peter Bassett: When the world is declared ‘water bankrupt’, reach for your wallet — and your scepticism

The phrase lands with a thud. Water bankruptcy. Not scarcity. Not stress. Bankruptcy — a word borrowed from finance, freighted with guilt, failure and finality. It suggests recklessness, mismanagement, and the need for an external administrator to step in and take control.

That is the language used in a new United Nations–backed report warning that parts of the world are approaching irreversible water collapse.

According to The Guardian, which splashed the findings prominently, the global water system is under such strain that “no one knows exactly when the whole system could collapse”.

The line belongs to Professor Kaveh Madani, lead author of the report and head of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health. It is dramatic, unsettling — and precisely the sort of framing that deserves careful handling rather than breathless amplification.

The report argues that rising demand, climate change and pollution are pushing freshwater systems beyond sustainable limits. About 70 per cent of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture.

Rivers such as the Colorado in the United States and the Murray–Darling in Australia no longer reliably reach the sea. Aquifers beneath cities including Mexico City and Tehran are being pumped faster than they can recharge, causing land to subside.

These are real problems. None of them are imaginary. But the leap from serious management failures to planetary bankruptcy is a rhetorical choice — not a scientific inevitability.

Bankruptcy is not a neutral term. It implies that existing arrangements — legal, political, institutional — are no longer fit for purpose. It hints that rights must be rewritten, controls centralised and emergency measures accepted as unavoidable. We have seen this logic before.

New Zealand readers will recognise the pathway from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: an aspirational document that, over time, migrated into domestic policy, legal argument and governance structures well beyond what voters were ever asked to endorse.

Water, however, is not money. The planet’s hydrological cycle is closed. Water does not disappear; it moves. What fails are local systems: storage, timing, allocation, quality and governance. Rivers fail to reach the sea because they are diverted upstream.

Cities reach “day zero” not because water has vanished, but because infrastructure, planning and political nerve have lagged behind demand.

Not all experts quoted alongside the report adopt the same register. Professor Albert Van Dijk of the Australian National University told The Guardian that increased variability may be as much a challenge as absolute scarcity — sometimes there is more water overall, he noted, but it arrives in bursts, at the wrong place and the wrong time.

That distinction matters. Variability demands storage, planning and infrastructure; collapse language demands submission.

The report does acknowledge this, but only in passing. Population growth, for example, is mentioned just once. Infrastructure — dams, reservoirs, recycling plants, desalination — barely features at all, despite obvious examples.

Israel recycles around 90 per cent of its wastewater. Singapore has turned water security into an engineering problem rather than a moral drama. None of this fits easily into a narrative of planetary failure.

Instead, the report leans heavily on framing. “Bankruptcy” does the work that evidence should do. It bypasses trade-offs and choices and presents outcomes as destiny. Like a coach blaming the weather after the All Blacks drop ball after ball, it externalises responsibility.

No need to ask who failed to invest, who delayed decisions, or who vetoed dams, pipes and treatment plants — the system itself has failed.

That framing matters in New Zealand, where water debates are already entangled with Treaty claims and assertions of prior rights. Over recent years, Maori leaders and organisations have increasingly argued that rivers, lakes and even resources flowing across land fall under customary authority because “we were here first”.

The logic is familiar: natural systems are reframed not as public goods to be managed for everyone, but as taonga requiring special governance arrangements.

A global narrative of “water bankruptcy” strengthens that hand. If water systems are collapsing, then ordinary democratic management is deemed inadequate. If the crisis is existential, then extraordinary remedies follow.

We have already seen how quickly international language seeps into local policy, re-emerging as consultation obligations, co-governance models and legal reinterpretations few voters recognise from election campaigns.

New Zealand offers a case study in how this crisis framing collides with political reality.

A January poll reported by The Post’s Andrea Vance found that 53 per cent of voters would rather uphold environmental protections than fast-track major infrastructure, even if that means sacrificing jobs or economic gains. Only 37 per cent supported bypassing consent processes to build dams, mines or energy projects.

The result is a country rich in rainfall but poor in storage; rich in rivers but reluctant to manage them. We resist dams, stall reservoirs, litigate transmission lines and argue endlessly over river “rights”, then express surprise when water shortages loom.

This is not planetary bankruptcy. It is a cultural refusal to choose — made more complex by Treaty claims that turn engineering problems into constitutional ones.

None of this is to deny environmental limits or climate pressures. But journalism’s job is to interrogate claims, not amplify metaphors.

When certain doom goblin activists and politicians, and institutions reach for apocalyptic language, it is usually because they want leverage — political, moral or institutional. Fear is a shortcut.

Water scarcity is not solved by declarations. It is solved by pipes, pumps, pricing, storage and sometimes unpopular decisions.

Calling the system “bankrupt” may make for compelling headlines, but it risks obscuring the truth: most water crises are the result of human choices, and therefore amenable to human correction.

Before we accept reports crafted to alarm us, we should ask a simple question. Are we being warned about physical limits — or being prepared, gently but firmly, for political ones?

Peter Bassett is an observer of media, politics and public institutions, writing on how narrative replaces scrutiny.