From crisis to bankruptcy

Can we, with our existing policies, institutions and knowledge, revive our lost springs?

The boiling frog apologue seems increasingly, and alarmingly appropriate for global, including Nepali, water woes. What was thought of as a crisis—large-scale but manageable—has turned into a paradigm-shattering realisation of irreversible bankruptcy on a planetary scale. In a new report , the United Nations University (UNU) confirmed that we have now entered a state of global water bankruptcy. Water bankruptcy alludes to a scenario beyond mere water crisis—an overused term used to describe water scarcity—to a state where local hydrological systems have been pushed to the point of collapse, rendering the systems unable to revert to their past state. Decades of excessive and rampant exploitation of water sources and vacillating precipitation patterns, along with rising temperatures, have pushed the local hydrological cycle beyond operating limits. These acts have reduced the rejuvenating capacity of most rivers, lakes, groundwater reserves, soil moisture, and glaciers.