India, April 19 -- It feels like one of our best-kept secrets. The water is running out. And yet we don't seem very worried. Perhaps one reason is that there seems to be so much of it. To put that in perspective, less than 3% of the water on Earth is freshwater. Earth's natural desalination programme, the rains, turns some of the vast ocean stores into potable supply, but we force most of that into drains and oceans, by blocking natural aquifers, filling up lakes and wetlands, and encroaching on rivers. Then the battles begin. Countries spar over dams, regions battle over rivers. In Mexico, farmers have set fire to government buildings and ambushed soldiers, to prevent water from being diverted to the US. Violent clashes between Cameroon's Musgum fishermen and semi-nomadic Choa Arab herders over access to water have driven thousands to migrate across the border to Chad. Over the past 10 years, in arid and civil war-struck Yemen, violence is often concentrated around water tankers, bottling stations and wells. Conflicts over water erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia; India and her neighbours; China and its neighbours; Turkey, Syria and Iraq; Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The list goes on. The fear and uncertainty driving such clashes reflect a stark reality: In January, the United Nations warned that the planet has entered an era of "water bankruptcy", a tipping point beyond which small-scale remedial measures such as better management and reduced waste will no longer meet the gap between the rate at which water is being withdrawn and the rate at which it can be replenished. How did we get here? A child could answer that: we have drawn more heavily from groundwater than we should have; blocked replenishment with concrete and deforestation; put rivers at risk from massive reservoirs, and reservoirs (as well as glaciers, rivers and lakes) at risk from rising temperatures. Perhaps the worst part of it all is that we have done this in service of two mega constructs: cities, and monoculture. Our cities waste more water than they use, while draining the regions around them. Around Beijing, this desertification has become so severe that it is causing giant dust storms that turn the sky orange. Water is similarly wasted across most irrigation networks, and the water that does reach the farms (much of it groundwater) is used to feed crops so water-intensive, they shouldn't be growing in the vast swathes of arid and semi-arid land where they are now planted. The real answer to how we got here, though, lies in the cultural shifts that made this possible. Early food-gathering societies and settlements protected forests and water bodies because there was recognition of the direct link between these and their own survival. That's how rivers and trees came to be viewed as sacred. As settlements grew into kingdoms and empires, this direct bond with local resources weakened until, by the modern age, it had snapped altogether. We no longer know where our water (or food or fuel) come from. Meanwhile, as cities have exploded, driven by extractive capitalism, markets and margins have taken over as the things we focus effort and attention on. The infinite-growth economy continues to depend on a natural world that cannot accommodate such a model. The result, over time, is visible in the climate crisis. Which has circled back to take its toll on water (as well as forests, monsoon systems, ocean environments and a host of other biospheres). Human-caused global warming has made the atmosphere thirstier, sapping more moisture from the soil, and from rivers and reservoirs. Winds transport this excess water into storm systems, often far away, leading to droughts in one region and deluges in another. "All this adds to existing challenges in managing water supply," says Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading. New guzzlers, such as data centres, are now emerging. AI already uses as much water worldwide, each year, as over 4 million American households. To address the water bankruptcy, we would need to start by rethinking water rights, water pricing and restrictions on use of water, says Kaveh Madani, a climate scientist and director of the United Nations thinktank on water, the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). We would need to rethink energy, food security, infrastructure. As looming as that may sound, a better way is not only possible, there are countries where small changes are already showing results. (Read the stories alongside for more on this.) "It doesn't help that, unlike air pollution, we do not have a simple, visible indicator of water loss," adds Mohammad Shamsudduha, a hydrogeologist with the University College London department of risk and disaster reduction. "What we really need is better local data to make water stress more visible and actionable." Failing which, he adds, perhaps the significant and growing risk itself will serve as a forced catalyst to action....