Much of the World Facing 'Water Bankruptcy,' U.N. Report Warns | Hacker News Reader

Much of the World Facing 'Water Bankruptcy,' U.N. Report Warns

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44 pointsspeckx62 comments

There 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.

There 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.

loong 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"

Add "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.

Desalinization 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...

I 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.

A whole lot of it is people living in stupid places feeling entitled to continue living in a place without the resources to support them.

Or we just scale up energy, allowing people to live everywhere!

I 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.

How 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?

Solar doesn't generate water in a desert far away from any sea to be desalinated.

I think you'll find that while those locations are bad, they don't compare to places in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Jordan. There are places easily 100x worse.

Far more fossil fuel is burned in Northern climates (needlessly!) for winter heating than is done for just living in the Southern climates, including A/C.

Okay but this is a discussion about water.

> feeling entitled to continue living in a place

Are you suggesting people are not entitled to live on land they own and should be forced to relocate? Since you've made their land worthless, how are they paying for this new place to live?

I heard a water district manager for a southwestern US city once say: "it's easier to move water than people." What if we adapted your statement for what the law actually allows?

> A whole lot of it is water being in stupid places feeling entitled to continue being in a place without the people nearby to drink it.

This implies we should move water to where people need it which is both legal and reflects reality even if it sounds very silly. Physics is even on our side here: water is deposited as snow on mountains where there are few people. It flows downward under the force of gravity to where people actually live. It's a pretty nice natural system to take advantage of!

The details here matter a lot: should we socialize the costs of moving water among people who do not directly need that water? Should people in Seattle pay for people in Yakima to get water? Irrigating dry unpopulated areas is a great way to produce food that is uneconomical to produce in or near cities!

Water management is a complex problem since it's needed for sustaining not just people, but the food people eat. There's no easy switch to flip here and just solve the thing.

>Are you suggesting people are not entitled to live on land they own and should be forced to relocate? Since you've made their land worthless, how are they paying for this new place to live?

Yes.

Or more specifically, owning a piece of land somewhere doesn't entitle you to water and resources from somewhere else. Particularly new development in underresourced areas shouldn't be permitted. But resources ought to be priced inaccessibly high for places where those resources don't exist and certain methods of delivering resources to those places should be prevented.

You want to live in the desert? Fine if you can figure it out. But you're not entitled to the rest of the world delivering food and water to you at unfairly low prices just because you want to live there.

Trying not to think about _We Stand On Guard_.

A comic book about USA invading Canada?

over water specifically

Other than maybe some very dry places, is this ever anything other than resource mis-management or under-investment in infrastructure?

Climate 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

Where 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.

There 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.

Perhaps the housing market is manipulated exactly for the purpose of reducing USA population size.

That’s a claim that would require real evidence, like someone admitting it or a very tight circumstantial case.

Otherwise it’s like saying electricity prices are being driven up to shut down indoor hydroponic pot growers, to make up a random example. High electricity prices might do that but…

Agent Smith called, he wants his speech back.

If we could put ourselves in the shoes of the people in charge in these places. We'll probably all agree we as the Government have a vested interest in maintaining social stability. One key to this is maintaining access to potable water. Sick and diseased people won't rebel, but they'll be unable to carry out ordinary functions, you'll be vulnerable to outside forces. In periods of drought access to food is affected, the population might get restless, again, we'll be happier if they're placid so let's make sure water is available. If we know our water system is threatened we'll use any method available to ensure access to water is not interrupted. Seek advice of a soothe-sayer, sacrifice to the gods, take IMF loans, go to war with a neighbor. If none of these things is successful, the situation is dire. The people will become dissatisfied, if they organize and obtain weapons we could see violence. At worst we could lose our heads, or at best flee to a wealthy country but leave behind our power. Therefore, we'll appoint our best people to manage and maintain our water system.

Washington State (and California?) gets its summer water from snowpack, not rainfall. If there's no snowpack, then we'd need massively larger reservoirs to hold water. I think it's more nuanced than "mis-management or under-investment".

Dystopian 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. :)

I call shotgun on riding the sandworm.

That's going to be a right bloody mess there, mate!

Surprisingly this is not something explored in "Dune" among the Fremen.

What 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

I 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.

Human 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.

We 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.

My 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-qua...

It 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.

It’s a good thing that a mindbogglingly large amount of fresh water falls on us every year, for free.

It seems unlikely to continue if the local water table is dry

2 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.

> 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.

Sure, 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.

> 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.

Look 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.

Is 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.

Wow, you're a genius, you should call up the UN and tell them they just forgot about rain! Problem solved!

We 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.

It’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.

We'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...

No. We're not. Not even close.

Earth 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.”

Yea, 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...

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