The Global Commission on the Economics of Water today published “Turning the Tide: A Call to Collective Action”, a report which alerts the world to a growing global water crisis and lays out actions that can and must be taken urgently and collectively to arrest it. Failing which, they highlight, the world will also fail on climate action and on all the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Dangerously, the water crisis is entangled with global warming and the loss of biodiversity, with each reinforcing the other. Human activities are changing patterns of rainfall, the source of all freshwater, leading to a shift in the supply of water across the entire world. “Every view of climate change that excludes water is incomplete,” said Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Commission. “For the first time in human history, we can no longer count on the source of all freshwater, our precipitation. We are changing the entire global hydrological cycle”. As an example he takes climate. “Each 1°C of global warming adds about 7% moisture to the water cycle, supercharging and intensifying it, leading to more and more extreme weather events”, continuing: “Water is thus both a driver and a victim of climate change.”

Water is also key to achieving all Sustainable Development Goals. More than two billion people still lack access to safely managed water. One child under five dies every 80 seconds from diseases caused by polluted water. “We need to develop a new economics of water that will help us reduce water waste, improve water efficiency, and provide opportunities for greater water equity,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization and co-chair of the Commission, adding that “Water cannot be put back on a sustainable trajectory without justice and equity in every corner of the globe.”

The world can only get out of this impasse by moving collectively and urgently in the current decade: through actions that are bolder, and more integrated and networked at national, regional, and global levels. The Commission’s Call to Collective Action lays out a seven-point agenda to achieve this.

Crucially, the world must recognize and manage the water cycle as a global common good, restoring and safeguarding it for all. The current, largely localised approaches to water management fail to recognise that countries are interconnected and depend on each other. This is due not only to transboundary rivers or streams of groundwater, but also due to atmospheric flows of water vapour originating from ecosystems on land. The water crisis is deeply intertwined with climate change and countries need to collaborate to resolve it.

To design a new economics that safeguards the water cycle, the Commission proposes an outcomes-focused, mission-driven approach which reflects the many roles water plays in human well-being. It must mobilize water stakeholders, including public, private, civil society and local community and utilize innovation policy to catalyze solutions to concrete problems; and scale up investments in water through new types of public-private partnerships.