Global Water Bankruptcy: What the UN Report Says and Where We Stand
A New Way of Understanding the Water Problem
In January 2026, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health published the Global Water Bankruptcy report. The report introduced a deliberate shift in language, moving from water crisis to water bankruptcy. Water bankruptcy, as the report defines it, is a condition in which long-term water use has exceeded renewable inflows and safe depletion limits for so long that returning to previous baselines is no longer realistically possible. In a state of bankruptcy, the goal is not to return to normal. In many regions, the report states plainly, normal is gone.
The report makes it explicit that an adequate response to water bankruptcy differs from crisis management. Crisis management aims to survive a shock and return to the previous state. Bankruptcy management requires acknowledging what has been lost, preventing further damage, and redesigning systems to function within a new hydrological reality.
The State of the World's Water
The Global Water Bankruptcy report documents the scale of what has already been lost. More than half of the world's large lakes have declined since the early 1990s. Around 70 percent of the world's major aquifers show long-term declining trends. Nearly three-quarters of the global population lives in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure, and around 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year.
These conditions are driven by human activity: over-allocation, groundwater depletion, land degradation, deforestation, pollution, and climate change. The planetary freshwater boundary has been transgressed. Roughly 70 percent of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture, making it the dominant pressure on water systems worldwide. Water quality compounds the problem further. Pollution from agricultural runoff, industrial and mining effluents, and salinization is shrinking the truly usable fraction of available water, even in basins where total volumes have not yet declined dramatically.
The report calls for transformative reform across agriculture, governance, and development models. It frames water as an upstream opportunity sector where investment has long-term benefits for food security, stability, and the environment. That is where the structural change needs to happen.
Why This Report Matters to Us
We build toilet systems for places where water is unavailable or impractical to use. The environments we serve, off-grid properties, remote builds, and water-scarce regions, are the same environments the report identifies as carrying the greatest water insecurity. It is one of the main challenges that the Solarid Toilet was designed to address.
However, we acknowledge that solving global water bankruptcy requires systemic reform at a scale that goes beyond residential sanitation. What Solarid Toilet System aims to do is remove water from one of the largest draws in the home, in the places where that resource is most constrained, and build a toilet system that does not depend on water to be functional and practical.
How the Solarid Toilet Fits Into the Greater Context
The report identifies 3.5 billion people as lacking safely managed sanitation. It calls for a new water agenda that takes water bankruptcy as its starting point, one that addresses how water is used across every system it touches. Sanitation is part of that conversation.
The Solarid Toilet uses patented dry-flush technology to handle waste without water, requiring no sewer or septic connection. Each Solarid Toilet has the capacity to save between 10,000 and 15,000 gallons of clean water per year compared to a conventional toilet. It was designed for locations where water and infrastructure are limited: off-grid homes, ADUs, cabins, remote builds, and water-scarce regions. Those are also the locations where water insecurity is most acute.
The structural reforms the report calls for, across agriculture, governance, and global water policy, are where the largest changes need to happen. Every build that installs a waterless sanitation system is one less draw on a resource the report documents as already beyond safe limits in many regions. That is what the Solarid Toilet makes possible.
Read the Full Report
Full report: Global Water Bankruptcy (UNU-INWEH, 2026)
UN News: World enters era of global water bankruptcy | January 20, 2026
Become a Pilot Partner
If you are working on a project where reducing water use is a priority, or where traditional sanitation infrastructure is not a practical option, we would like to hear about it. Pilot partners get early access to the Solarid Toilet system and direct support from our team.