The UN says We Are Going Bankrupt
But they aren’t talking about money
Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽
The UN says We Are Going Bankrupt
Quiz of the Week
Startup 1: Boson White Water
Startup 2: Epic CleanTec
Startup 3: Membrion
The UN says We Are Going Bankrupt
But they aren’t talking about money
In January 2026, the United Nations released a report that used a word we usually hear in boardrooms and courtrooms: bankruptcy.
But they weren’t talking about money. They were talking about water.
The UN’s researchers said that the world has entered what they’re calling Global Water Bankruptcy.
That means we’ve been pulling water out of rivers, lakes, and underground reserves faster than nature can put it back. And in many places, the damage is now beyond full recovery.
Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water-insecure.
Around 2.2 billion people don’t have access to safely managed drinking water.
3.5 billion lack proper sanitation.
And about 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month every year.
More than half of the world’s large lakes have lost water since the early 1990s. Major rivers are failing to reach the sea. And 70% of the world’s major aquifers, the underground reserves we depend on, are declining.
Think of it like a bank account. You keep withdrawing, but the deposits have slowed to a trickle. The account still shows a balance, so everything looks fine. Until it doesn’t. That’s water bankruptcy.
Now, Let’s Talk About AI and Water
Here’s something most of us (including me) don’t think about when they ask AI a question or generate an image: it takes water to do that.
Every time you use an AI tool, the request goes to a data center, a massive building packed with thousands of computer chips, all running at full speed, all day, every day. That generates a lot of heat.
And to keep those chips from melting down, most data centers pump water through cooling systems. Lots of water.
How much? A single 1-megawatt data center can use around 26 million litres of water a year just for cooling.
Scale that up to a 30-megawatt facility, and you’re looking at hundreds of millions of litres, comparable to the yearly water use of tens of thousands of households.
Some companies are experimenting with seawater or closed-loop recycling systems, but fresh water is still the standard in most facilities. And the demand is only growing.
The global AI boom means more data centers, bigger data centers, and more water. Now here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
The Driest Places Are Building the Most Data Centers
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Gulf states are racing to become AI and cloud hubs. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, they’re all building data centers at speed.
MENA holds about 6.3% of the world’s population but only 1.4% of its renewable freshwater. It’s the most water-stressed region on the planet. Eleven of the 17 most water-stressed countries globally are in the MENA region.
Because there’s so little natural freshwater, countries like Kuwait (90%), Oman (86%), and Saudi Arabia (70%) rely heavily on desalination — turning seawater into drinking water.
That process is energy-intensive and can harm marine ecosystems through brine discharge. So every extra unit of water needed to cool AI infrastructure could also mean more emissions and more damage to coastlines.
In India, the picture is just as concerning. Cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore are the centres of India’s data centre boom, the same cities already dealing with water shortages, contaminated supply, and failing infrastructure.
India’s data center market is projected to exceed $100 billion by next year. Google, OpenAI, and others are pouring in gigawatts of capacity.
But these cities can barely keep taps running as it is.
A Note on Hypocrisy (Mine, Specifically)
I should be upfront about something. I use AI every day. I mostly use it to draft and organise my work.
Some of the writing for this very edition was done with AI tools. So, writing about how AI is making the water crisis worse while actively using it? Yeah, that’s a contradiction I’m sitting with.
But I don’t think the answer is to pretend it’s not happening or to swear off AI entirely.
AI is genuinely useful. It’s helping people do more with less, and it’s accelerating work in fields like climate science, healthcare, and clean energy.
One of my favorite stories was this: A man used AI to help make a cancer vaccine for his dog – an oncologist urges caution
Anyway, the problem isn’t AI itself. The problem is that the infrastructure behind AI, the data centers, the cooling systems, the energy grids, is being scaled up without enough thought about what it costs the places where it’s built.
So this isn’t an anti-AI newsletter. It’s a “let’s be honest about what’s happening” newsletter.
We can use AI and also demand that the companies building it take responsibility for its real-world footprint. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
And honestly, if you’re reading a newsletter about sustainability in 2026, you’re probably already someone who holds more than one truth at a time.
So What Can Actually Be Done?
That’s what the rest of this edition is about. Because while the problem is real and urgent, people are working on it. Brands building solutions for water treatment, conservation, and access, not in some distant future, but right now.
Let’s meet them, but before we do that, see if you can estimate this number below👇
⌛ Time for the quiz of the week
According to the UN report mentioned above, women play a central role in household water provision, especially in rural areas. Instead of spending time on education, leisure, or income-generating activities, women and girls across the world collectively spend X hours every day collecting water.
Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉
Cities are running out of water, and we are draining groundwater faster than it can naturally recharge. That is why solutions that create new supply matter.
Boson White Water is doing that by turning treated sewage water into potable water through an 11-stage purification process, where each stage removes a different class of contaminants.
Instead of asking buildings to buy more tanker water, their system can be leased and installed in:
🏘️ Apartments
🏢 Offices
🛒 Shopping malls
When the lease costs less than the purchased water, the business case is straightforward.
And the impact is bigger than one building: it reduces pressure on freshwater sources and gives local aquifers a chance to recover.
Boson Whitewater tackles supply at the building level. Epic Cleantec takes a similar approach but goes further inside the building itself, treating and recycling wastewater on-site so it never has to leave.
Their onsite systems:
Capture greywater and blackwater
Treat it to high safety standards
Reuse it for toilet flushing, cooling towers, and irrigation
The result is straightforward: buildings can cut potable water use by up to 90% for non-drinking purposes.
That means:
Lower water bills
Less strain on city water and sewer systems
Greater resilience during droughts
A smaller environmental footprint
And they go one step further.
Epic Cleantec also transforms solid waste into nutrient-rich soil products, helping close the loop beyond water reuse.
Where Boson and Epic Cleantec focus on residential and commercial buildings, Membrion applies the same principle, treat and reuse at the source, to industrial facilities, where water is often heavily contaminated with metals and chemicals.
Their on-site systems use:
Electrical fields
Ceramic desalination membranes
A silica-gel-derived ceramic material (the same base material found in moisture-absorbing packets, engineered for water treatment)
The result is straightforward: facilities can recover usable water at the source while reducing disposal burdens.
That means:
Lower operating costs
Better compliance with stricter discharge and disposal regulations
Less polluted water is released into the environment
Industrial sites depend on water to run day-to-day operations. But in many facilities, the loop looks like this:
Clean water goes in
Contaminated, metal-laden wastewater comes out
And it gets discarded instead of being reused
That is why solutions that treat and recycle water on-site matter.
Some Other Notable Water Solutions
Mimbly — A device that attaches to any washing machine to filter microplastics and reuse wash water, reducing water waste and plastic pollution.
High Sierra Showerheads — Engineered a single-nozzle showerhead that uses up to 40% less water without sacrificing pressure or comfort.
NetworkOcean — Builds underwater data centres cooled by natural ocean currents, eliminating freshwater consumption for AI infrastructure cooling.
Quiz answer: 250,000,000 hours
Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you in two weeks :)