Kaveh Madani

By looking at the trends of changes in water storage, we've concluded that we are seeing more and more basins around the world that are showing symptoms of significant overconsumption and in many cases also irreversibility of the damages to the ecosystem. So when we say the globe is water bankrupt, the planet is water bankrupt, we don't mean water.

that the whole world or every country, every basin, every aquifer is water bankrupt. But we mean that this is an era where we are seeing more and more systems getting into the post-crisis situation. Water pollution problems are becoming chronic. They're no longer anomaly or deviation from a normal and

and these are permanent problems. But we should worry about them because in an interconnected world, where we are interconnected not only through the climate system, but also through trades, food trades, trades of different goods and supply chains, in addition to economics, geopolitics, migration and other issues, the whole global risk landscape has been impacted and this can have major consequences for the world.

What are the biggest factors behind this global water bankruptcy? On one side we have climate change that is resulting in declining water levels in many other places, but at the same time on the other hand we have increased water consumption because of course increased population, but the demand, increased demand for food, energy, drinking water, industrialization, now data centers on top of all these things. So we continue to consume more and more, we continue to grow more food.

We continue to expand. On the other hand, we are facing declining water resources. This has worked in a way that we took more and more water out of the system. We withdrew more water first from our checking account, that surface water, the water that gets renewed through precipitation every year. Then we went to our savings account, our groundwater. We drained that one. Now we have a lot of stakeholders out there.

We took more and more loans from nature. We kind of stole even the share of the environment, the silent stakeholder. And as a result we are now seeing that there are major ecosystem damages. Our wetlands are dry, our reservoirs are declining. Water level is dropping and we see a lot of symptoms. Sinkholes around the world, land subsidence in different parts of the world.

Kaveh Medani puhuu Ansoiista.