United Nations Warns of Global Water Bankruptcy
In recent days, the United Nations published a report declaring global “water bankruptcy,” adding to a series of apocalyptic warnings. We are overspending on our “income” – river flows and precipitation – and depleting stored assets accumulated over thousands of years in underground aquifers. Mexico serves as a tragic example, with shrinking and polluted lakes (Pátzcuaro, Chapala), unique biodiversity lagoons being dried up (Mayrán, Cuatro Ciénegas), saline intrusion from overexploited aquifers (Ensenada, Valle de Guadalupe, Mexicali, Hermosillo, Yucatán), destruction of riparian ecosystems and mangroves (Tabasco, shrimp farms in Sinaloa, Quintana Roo), deforestation of watersheds, and polluted river channels filled with trash (Lerma, Atoyac).
More than 115 underground aquifers in Mexico are overexploited, with water extracted at greater depths, consuming more electricity and becoming contaminated with arsenic from subsurface rocks. Irrigation agriculture consumes over 75% of the total water used in Mexico, facing threats or severe restrictions due to surface water shortages and depleted aquifers. Many cities suffer from water scarcity while vast amounts are wasted in agriculture and distribution networks. Water bodies become useless due to the lack of efficient wastewater treatment systems, leading to contamination.
Addressing the Water Crisis: Economic, Institutional, and Technological Solutions
Despite these tragedies, most are self-inflicted and avoidable. While alarmist diagnoses from organizations like the UN abound, practical policy proposals remain scarce. Instead of discussing water in abstract terms as an unavoidable catastrophe, we should analyze it by economic sectors, cities, and regions. As a scarce and valuable resource not billed by definition, water deteriorates and is exhausted. Water crises have economic, institutional, and technological solutions.
Water, as a public good, should be managed through state regulation, property rights, public investment, public-private partnerships, cost-reflective pricing, transparent and targeted subsidies (when necessary), law enforcement, surveillance, information dissemination, and technological development – as evidenced by Israel’s success. Irrigation should no longer rely on flooding or surface water; both should be billed per cubic meter to farmers, accompanied by an ambitious irrigation technology modernization policy.
- Water Market Allowance: Enable and encourage water markets and exchanges between concessionaires and sectors, such as transferring water from agriculture to industry or urban use.
- Prioritize Water Allocation: Assign scarce water resources to high-value economic and social activities, including ecological uses in aquatic ecosystems.
- Urban Water Billing: Charge for covering investment, operation, and maintenance costs, including bulk water supply, potabilization, distribution, drainage, and wastewater treatment.
- Desalination and Wastewater Treatment: Desalinate seawater or treat urban wastewater for high-value crop irrigation (vineyards, vegetables, fruits, soybeans, sorghum, wheat).
- Targeted Subsidies: Provide transparent, focused, and direct subsidies to the poor.
Extreme Measures for Water Scarcity
In extreme cases, develop inter-basin transfer infrastructure and large-scale seawater desalination via reverse osmosis, along with long-distance aqueducts involving private investment. Clean energy sources and nuclear power should generate the electricity needed for desalination and pumping. Eliminate perverse subsidies for agricultural pumping of groundwater, and establish remote monitoring systems for extraction, law enforcement, and compliance.
- Strict Aquifer Exploitation Limits: Implement strict extraction limits for aquifers to ensure their conservation and create a water allocation market (Cap and Trade).
- Agricultural Adjustments: Force farmers unable to afford water or technology upgrades to switch crops, find alternative livelihoods, or migrate. Subsidizing or allowing water waste for unproductive, unsustainable agriculture is irrational.
- Regulation of Water Operators: Strictly regulate municipal water operators concerning tariffs, physical and operational efficiency, cost recovery, administration, medium-term and long-term plans, coverage, and wastewater treatment and reuse.
- Penalties for Non-Compliance: Penalize municipalities failing to meet regulations.
- Importing Water via Agricultural Products: Import water through agricultural products whose cultivation in Mexico is hydromorphically unfeasible.
