The impacts of the chronic drawdown of both surface water and groundwater resources.

 The impacts of the chronic drawdown of both surface water and groundwater resources go beyond humanwater systems. These trends continue to destroy and degrade the silent stakeholder: the environment. They liquidate our natural capital. The degrading natural capital is further intensifying environmental and climatic changes through reinforcing feedback loops. The stationary baseline ecosystem services that we built our societies, economies, and institutions based on no longer exist. The accelerating, degrading changes, which our own actions continue to contribute to, narrow the margin for error in water management, leaving societies more exposed to extremes and less able to smooth variability over time. The global observations reinforce the picture of a structural overshoot. Many human-water systems are operating beyond their hydrological carrying capacity, with irreversible damages to the environment and global natural capital. In these regions, crisis management aimed at restoring previous production levels without reshaping demand and cropping patterns only deepens the overshoot. Droughts have shifted from being primarily a climate-driven, episodic hazard to being, in many places, a chronic human-made condition. This is a hallmark of water bankruptcy: what appears on the surface as a crisis is, in fact, a new baseline.

The patterns observed around the world are not those of a system struggling through a temporary crisis. They indicate that many key renewable water systems have crossed thresholds where full restoration is no longer realistic, even with large investments. The strategic, non-renewable water reserves of many societies have also been drawn down beyond safe depletion limits in large parts of the world. In such places, bankruptcy is not a metaphor but an empirical description: the water-dependent natural capital that once underpinned resilience has been liquidated.

. Global land and ocean temperature anomalies. The chart shows how global temperature has increased over time when compared to the1901-2000 average. Chart produced using the data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Climate at a Glance: Global Time Series.