Global Water Bankruptcy and Other Things I Thought About in the Bath

The water in my bath had gone lukewarm before I noticed.

The book was balanced on my chest. The traffic outside the window had disappeared. Even the condensation spreading across the glass seemed irrelevant. I was concentrating.

Then I read a phrase I couldn’t stop thinking about:

global water bankruptcy.

Suddenly the bath didn’t feel like a place to relax in, though when I say relax, I don’t mean lying in warm water as empty-headed as possible. What I like to do is write on my phone as well as read. The suds on the surface of the water slowly disappeared unnoticed. The traffic outside the window continued unheard. Condensation on the glass, like an over-watered abstract Milton Resnick painting, might as well not have been there.

Concentration was, as so often, all.

One of the most unsettling ideas in water policy is what a recent United Nations University report calls “global water bankruptcy”: a condition in which drought, overuse, pollution, and climate change are depleting water resources faster than they can recover.

While I was reading or writing, the water was doing something unusual: it was being ignored.

For billions of people, that remains impossible. Water is still something that must be fetched, rationed, filtered, carried, worried about.

One of my favourite facts as a boy was that ice floated.

That seemed almost magical. Lakes froze from the top down, leaving liquid water beneath. Fish survived winter because water behaved differently from almost every other substance on earth.

As a boy, every fact I learned about water made it seem miraculous.

As an adult, every fact I learn about water makes it seem endangered.

The water stories that reach me now are so very different.

My grandmother, who owned a hotel with a number of bathrooms, once said she wished she could lie in a bath and have somebody bring hot water and pour it in at regular intervals. The thought amused me and appeared harmless enough. I suppose I hadn’t given much thought to the people who might have been tasked to carry all that water.

The fantasy depended on abundance.

Most fantasies do.

Water shortages increasingly determine who gets access and who goes without. The assumption that water will always be available when we turn on a tap is becoming harder to sustain.

School in Scotland meant deep, dirty tubs. You never shared them with other boys, but you shared their dirt, especially after sports. Then one day I was introduced to the shower. A revolution took place. I entered a period in which I couldn’t envisage having a bath, put off as I was by the prospect of all that lingering dirty water.

The shower solved one problem.

It created another.

The flat I moved into at sixteen, in Edinburgh, had no hot running water and no bathroom. So I had to make do with a sink and cold water in the sitting room.

Writing that, I think of that Monty Python sketch exemplifying the absurdity of exaggerated tales of hardship: “A cardboard box? You were lucky! We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank.”

Yet there are people for whom inadequate washing facilities are not a comic memory but an everyday reality. Poor hygiene can result from poverty, illness, depression, dementia, neglect, displacement, or simple lack of infrastructure. Sanitation and hygiene remain unresolved issues, not inconveniences.

I always felt privileged having a shower in my pod in Afghanistan, staring up at the water while remembering the kids I had just filmed with torn plastic kites racing across dry terrain. I felt guilt at using a hotel shower during the Balkan war when I knew not so far away were people rounded up with nothing to drink—and even worse to come. But what I seldom considered was the water itself. Drinking water. Washing water. Water as a resource rather than an amenity.

Yet even then I was thinking too narrowly. Most of the water humanity uses is not drunk or poured into baths. It disappears into fields. Roughly seventy per cent of the world’s freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture. Water is present not only in rivers and reservoirs but hidden inside breakfasts, cotton shirts, cups of coffee, and almost everything else we consume. We speak of water shortages as though they occur somewhere else. In reality, we carry them home in shopping bags.

As for safe drinking water, it remains out of reach for billions of people. Billions more still lack adequate sanitation or even somewhere reliable to wash their hands.

At the same time, communities are experimenting with new solutions—from extracting drinking water directly from humid air in drought-prone regions to investing in more resilient water, sanitation, and hygiene systems ahead of the UN Water Conference in the United Arab Emirates in December 2026. Necessity, as usual, is proving inventive.

All of this seems very distant from a man lying in a bath with a book.

Then again, perhaps it isn’t.

It is easy to imagine that global water bankruptcy belongs somewhere else: in drought-stricken valleys, refugee camps, reservoirs, and government reports. Yet every bath depends on the same finite substance. The difference is not that I am outside the story. It is that I have been fortunate enough to treat water as background scenery.

The bathwater had gone cold long ago.

I had barely noticed.

That, perhaps, is the real privilege—not having water, but being able to forget about it.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.