‘Living Water’ in an Era of Water Bankruptcy

It seems both ironic and curiously fitting that in the same year that the UN has formally declared we have entered ‘an era of global water bankruptcy’, the theme for the Season of Creation is ‘living water’. Never has attention to such a theme been so relevant or urgent.  The UN report ¹ outlines how the familiar pattern of repeated water crises caused by temporary shocks such as drought, flood, hurricane, wildfire or contamination, followed by recovery, has been decisively broken.  As shifting weather patterns increasingly disrupt traditional rainy seasons, inland water bodies such as lakes, wetlands and rural water boreholes have shrunk and dried out and groundwater levels have fallen. Over-extraction of water and pollution of waterways have brought the world beyond safe depletion limits and renewable inflows. Meanwhile, overheating is melting the great frozen cryosphere*, as we have witnessed with such heart-breaking results in Nepal, where a collapsed glacier engulfed and utterly devastated vast areas of surrounding hinterland.

The world now faces chronic, structurally embedded water stress. In many basins, the ‘normal’ to which crisis managers once hoped to return has effectively vanished, the report said “and no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse.”  Nearly three quarters of the global population live in water-insecure countries where extreme water scarcity regularly occurs. Two billion people live on ground that is sinking as groundwater aquifers collapse. With every passing season, ecosystems are being destroyed and thousands of plant and animal species are becoming extinct, their healing and nutritional promise lost and their voices forever silenced. Ecological breakdown on such a scale is a threat not just to water security, but also to food security. Agriculture consumes about 70% of all global freshwater withdrawals, nearly 30% of which is used for animal feed (a highly nutrition-inefficient way of feeding the world’s populations).  The number of conflicts over water reached a record high in 2024, further threatening geopolitical stability.

It feels natural and right to celebrate the wonderful gift of water in our lives. Through grace freely given to all, God has provided springs of living water to bubble up, rivers to flow down from the mountains and rain to fall on the earth. But in the industrialised west, we have hijacked that gift with our chronic over-use and pollution.  What should we do with the knowledge that it is our fossil-fuel-driven economies that first generated the existential crisis we face and our consumer-driven ambitions that continue to amplify it? We are witnessing a global threat that falls heaviest on the urban poor, small sufficiency farmers, indigenous people, women and the young – the very marginalised groups Jesus spoke about when he told us that neglecting their needs is akin to neglecting him. We may feel helpless to avoid being complicit in the escalating harms we are causing but how can we feel comfortable as we continue to delight in the riches and comforts our way of life has brought, while others who bear no responsibility at all are suffering privations unimaginable to us?

Wherein lies hope? Firstly, although the report leaves us in no doubt as to the gravity and urgency of the problem, it also frames water as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It calls for a transition from crisis response to bankruptcy management. This must be grounded in honesty about the irreversibility of losses, protection of remaining water resources and policies that match hydrological reality. Serious investment in water could unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies.  The report’s lead author argues there is still time, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, to act to strengthen resilience and rebuild trust through tangible results.  As a church with a strong earth justice ethos, how do we support this call for global action?

At the same time, there is much we can do closer to home. I have been struck by an experience I had when trying to enact my carbon literacy pledges. I was seeing them as a series of deprivations or sacrifices. I was exercised by the thought, for example, of forsaking the blissful daily indulgence of a 10-minute vigorous hot shower for an efficient 2-minute gentle flow? Then one day, I caught a few moments of a radio programme. Someone was saying how liberating it was when he stopped thinking like a consumer and started thinking like a citizen. The next morning in the shower I was thinking of myself as a citizen of the same planet that I share with countless other citizen beings, human and other than human. We all need our daily share of the astonishing gift of water, but while most creatures neither hoard nor waste it, my greed and excess were trespassing on their right to satisfy it at all. I started noticing just how wonderful each drop was, sparkling and cleansing and refreshing. I actually enjoyed turning off the tap when it had given me all I needed. I felt in right relation with the gift, the giver and the great community of other beings with whom I share it. It felt like a kind of epiphany – the joy of enough in an economy of abundance. (I should confess that I do not consistently hold onto that way of thinking or behaving but I do not forget how much better it feels when I do.) As a recent Laudato Si document states, there could surely never have been a better time for God’s Living Water to renew what has become dry within us and to flow outward—into our relationships, our communities, our care for creation and our human and other than human kin.

*Cryosphere. All the frozen water on Earth, including ice and snow on land, frozen ground, and ice in water.

1.https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Bankruptcy_Report__2026_.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/20/era-of-global-water-bankruptcy-is-here-un-report-says