The World Matters: SDG 6: The Thirst That Never Ends
Why Water Justice Can't Wait... From broken pipes to broken promises — and why even AI is drinking us dry.
The Water Line
We are living through the age of algorithms, rockets, and self-driving everything — but for over two billion people, the most advanced technology they use each day is a plastic jerry can.
While we argue over bandwidth and policy shifts, millions are still walking for water. Still boiling to survive. Still paying more than they should for water that often makes them sick. If you're lucky enough to flush and forget, you’re in the global minority.
This isn’t a resource issue. It’s a justice issue.
Clean water is not a luxury. It is not a future goal. It’s a non-negotiable foundation for human dignity, development, and peace. And yet, we’ve normalised its absence in entire regions of the world. Even worse — we’ve allowed systems that consume the most water to grow with the least accountability.
The deeper you look, the more obvious it becomes: the water crisis is not just about climate, or funding, or mismanagement. It’s about power — who holds it, who loses it, and who drowns in the silence.
“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” — Benjamin Franklin
The Promise We’re Failing to Keep
The UN once asked:
“How far would you walk for water?”
For too many, the answer is still: “Farther than yesterday.”
Goal 6 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals promised clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. But with five years left, we’re not just off track — we’re running dry.
To understand the true depth of this crisis, we need to start with what’s keeping us stuck. These are the four pillars that hold up the problem — and why they’re starting to crack.
Four Pillars: Why This Isn’t Just a Water Problem
1. Access Isn’t Universal — It’s Unequal by Design
In too many parts of the world, the issue isn’t that there’s no water — it’s that the water doesn’t reach the people who need it most. Broken pipes, absent infrastructure, and political neglect have turned basic access into a postcode lottery. In slums and camps, people pay more for unsafe water than city residents pay for treated supplies. That’s not just unjust. It’s deliberate.
Meanwhile, large-scale developments, luxury compounds, and industrial parks enjoy uninterrupted supply. In cities like Lagos and Jakarta, private tankers sell water door-to-door at inflated prices while official networks bypass entire districts. The result? A two-tiered system where survival is expensive and inequality is piped in.
2. Sanitation and Health Are Still Being Treated Separately
You can’t fix the water crisis without fixing toilets, drains, and hygiene infrastructure. But most governments and donors still treat sanitation as a second-tier issue. The result? Preventable diseases that wipe out childhoods, menstruation-related dropout rates that silence girls, and healthcare systems overloaded with illnesses that should never have existed.
In places like Cox’s Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh — one of the largest in the world — limited access to safe toilets and clean water creates a breeding ground for cholera, hepatitis, and diarrhoea. These aren’t occasional outbreaks. They’re systemic consequences of disjointed planning.
3. Technology Is Draining Us Instead of Saving Us
We like to think innovation is the solution. But some of our most advanced tools — especially artificial intelligence — come with a hidden water bill. Data centres consume vast quantities of water to stay cool, and the public rarely knows how much is being used or from where. When tech growth comes at the cost of clean water for others, it’s not progress. It’s displacement.
In places like Iowa, Chile, and the Netherlands, tech giants have built server farms that draw directly from local water systems. These sites are essential to the digital world — but invisible to most users. And the trade-offs? Often hidden in nondisclosure agreements, rural communities, and evaporated aquifers.
4. We Still Believe the Tap Will Never Run Dry
In the Global North, there’s a myth of abundance. Taps flow, lawns stay green, and consumption feels invisible. But aquifers are collapsing, rivers are shrinking, and climate volatility is making fresh water harder to predict and protect.
“We act like water is unlimited. It’s not. And the price of our illusion is being paid — right now — by people who can’t afford the lie.”
Las Vegas is already piping water from deeper and farther. France has begun rationing in drought-hit regions. Even the UK now sees hosepipe bans as routine. The myth isn’t just breaking — it’s crumbling. But behaviour hasn’t caught up with reality.
And behind every one of these failures lies the same hard truth: Water justice isn’t about access alone — it’s about dignity, fairness, and accountability.
A World Dying of Thirst
We talk a lot about progress. About innovation, growth, technology. But for billions of people, that progress hasn’t reached the most basic corner of their lives: the right to clean water. While some enjoy instant access with a flick of the wrist, others still start each day with a journey just to survive.
In the last piece, I explored what happens when people lose the security of home. But long before home disappears, it dries up. If home is where survival begins, then water is what makes it possible. Without it, nothing else matters. Not shelter. Not schooling. Not safety.
And today, even that most essential need is under siege — not just from climate change, corruption, or poor governance — but from something far more subtle: the silent consumption of the future itself.
Even our smartest machines are now part of the problem.
The Geography of Dehydration
Not all water crises look like deserts. Some are hidden in plain sight — in crowded cities where pipes don’t reach the poor. In Rio’s favelas, Nairobi’s informal settlements, or Dhaka’s swelling slums, clean water isn’t just hard to find. It’s expensive. In many cases, people in the poorest neighbourhoods pay more per litre than those in wealthier areas, simply because there’s no functioning infrastructure.
Meanwhile, in parts of the Middle East and North America, fountains flow, golf courses stay green, and lawns are watered through drought. The story isn’t about global scarcity. It’s about deliberate inequality.
Water infrastructure has become a mirror of the wider system: rigged to serve the few, while the many are left with buckets, bills, or bribes. It’s not that we lack the technology. It’s that we’ve chosen where — and whom — to serve.
The Disease Cycle Nobody Breaks
Water and sanitation aren’t two different issues — they’re twins. You can’t fix one without the other. And when both are broken, disease moves in fast.
Cholera outbreaks still happen regularly in refugee camps, where entire communities share a single latrine or use open drainage systems. In many places, children are chronically ill not because of viruses or accidents — but because their water is poisoned, and there’s no soap or safe place to go to the toilet.
But this crisis also plays out quietly. In schools without period-safe toilets, girls miss days, then weeks, then drop out entirely. In households without sanitation, infants get sick. And when they do, someone — usually a mother or sister — stays home to care for them, perpetuating a cycle of lost time, lost income, lost opportunity.
These are not accidents. They are policy failures. Drought isn’t always natural. Sometimes it’s designed — through delay, neglect, or silence.
The AI Paradox — Smarter Systems, Dumber Consequences
We love to believe in big ideas. And artificial intelligence is the latest one. It's marketed as the answer to everything — from fighting climate change to optimising water use. But here's the uncomfortable truth: AI is thirsty. And not in the metaphorical sense.
The infrastructure powering AI — particularly large-scale data centres — consumes staggering amounts of water. Most of it is used to cool the servers that process billions of queries, code generations, and machine learning tasks every second. In 2022 alone, Google, Microsoft, and Meta used an estimated 580 billion gallons of water — enough to meet the annual needs of over 15 million households. And projections suggest that by 2028, AI activity in the U.S. alone could demand 720 billion gallons annually for cooling.
One Microsoft facility in Iowa used over 11.5 million gallons in a single quarter while training advanced OpenAI models. Meanwhile, Google’s centre in Mesa, Arizona is permitted to draw 5.5 million cubic metres a year — roughly equivalent to what 23,000 people would use. And in drought-stricken Santiago, Chile, another Google facility is estimated to consume over 100 million gallons annually, worsening an already fragile water situation.
“It’s ironic that AI is seen as the future of sustainability — when it’s using more water than entire towns.” — Kate Crawford, AI researcher and author of Atlas of AI
The issue doesn’t stop with the servers. A study from the University of California, Riverside found that ChatGPT’s true water footprint may be four times higher than originally estimated. Just 10–50 prompts can consume up to two litres of water — when you include the full ecosystem: data centre cooling, power generation, and chip manufacturing.
Tech companies are starting to explore mitigation — air-cooled systems, grey water loops, wastewater recovery. But these changes are not scaling nearly as fast as the infrastructure itself. In Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI is building “Colossus,” a supercomputer expected to consume over five million gallons of water per day. Plans include an $80 million treatment facility to soften the impact — but even that has raised concerns from local environmental groups about the strain on the region’s aquifer system.
And all of this is happening quietly. Many of these facilities are built in low-regulation, high-stress regions, with little community consultation and even less public transparency. In many cases, residents don’t realise how much water is being extracted — until wells run dry.
And while facilities like Japan’s Super-Kamiokande — one of the most advanced neutrino detectors on Earth — require over 50,000 tonnes of ultra-pure water, used for science, disclosed in full, and justified with public purpose.
AI data centres, by contrast, consume comparable volumes without the same scrutiny or ethical debate — often in places where clean water is already in crisis.
So while tech leaders tell us AI will help monitor rainfall, optimise agriculture, or predict droughts… the industry itself is silently draining the very systems it claims it will save.
We have to ask the harder question: Are we building a smarter world — or just letting the next system drink the old one dry while we applaud?
The Myth of Abundance
In affluent nations, water often seems limitless. A simple turn of the tap yields a steady flow; showers are long, lawns remain lush, and the convenience of water is taken for granted. However, this perception of endless supply is rapidly unraveling.
Recent reports indicate that in 2023, global rivers experienced their driest year in over three decades, with more than half of river catchment areas showing abnormal or deficit conditions. Major rivers such as the Amazon, Mississippi, and the Ganges saw drastically reduced water levels, threatening the stability of agriculture, electricity, and entire populations downstream.
At the same time, glaciers are melting faster than ever recorded. These silent reservoirs — once dependable buffers against drought — are vanishing. And with them, the food and water security of over two billion people. When the world’s natural storage tanks start to collapse, it isn’t just ecosystems that suffer. It’s nations, economies, and futures.
But the problem isn’t just how much water we use — it’s what we use it for. Foods like beef, almonds, and avocados come with immense hidden water costs. A single kilogram of beef takes around 15,000 litres of water to produce. Almonds can demand up to 10,000 litres. Even avocados, the poster child of “clean” eating, can soak up 2,000 litres per kilo.
This kind of consumption doesn’t feel wasteful because we rarely see it. It’s embedded in supply chains, buried in supermarket shelves, and erased by convenience. But the truth is simple: every choice we make draws from a system that’s running low. If menus came with water tags, would we order differently? And if we really believed water was finite, would we still use it like it isn’t?
This Isn’t Just Urgent — It’s Immediate
2030 was the deadline. But for millions, the crisis isn’t five years away — it’s five hours away.
“The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water.” — Ismail Serageldin
Water stress isn’t coming. It’s already here — and in some places, it’s already too late.
Right now, nearly 1 in 4 people globally are drinking from unsafe or unreliable sources. That’s not a forecast — that’s today’s reality. In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 400 million people still lack basic drinking water services. In Gaza, water is contaminated. In rural parts of South Asia, entire communities rely on arsenic-laced wells. And every month, new reports show that aquifers — the underground safety nets of civilisation — are drying faster than we can measure.
This isn’t some abstract environmental issue. It’s the thing that decides whether children survive their first five years. Whether girls go to school. Whether communities thrive or collapse. When water goes, everything goes.
Even in the richest countries, warning signs are flashing. California’s reservoirs are shrinking. Spain’s agriculture is at war with its water tables. In parts of Australia, rainfall patterns have shifted so dramatically that some farmers are abandoning entire crops. Climate change isn’t just heating the world — it’s drying it out, destabilising the very foundation we’ve built our societies on.
And all the while, we let the thirst grow quietly — in our tech, in our food systems, in our political avoidance.
There is no future without water. And right now, the future is looking very, very thirsty.
Where It’s Already Working
Even in the midst of a worsening global crisis, there are communities, movements, and innovators proving that progress is possible. These aren’t perfect solutions — but they show that with the right focus, justice can flow.
1. Cape Town’s Day Zero Plan — Turning Panic Into Policy
In 2018, Cape Town came within weeks of running out of water. The city faced the unthinkable: shutting off the municipal supply. But instead of collapsing, Cape Town adapted. With an aggressive mix of water restrictions, behavioural campaigns, leak repairs, and alternative sourcing, usage was cut by over 50%. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t equitable. But it showed what urgency plus leadership can do — and sparked similar contingency plans in other at-risk cities.
2. Chennai’s Rainwater Revolution
After suffering a series of devastating droughts, the Indian city of Chennai made rainwater harvesting mandatory for all buildings. What started as an emergency response evolved into a quiet transformation. Groundwater levels stabilised. Residents began capturing seasonal monsoons on rooftops. And the city built resilience by tapping into something it had always had — but never collected.
3. Kisumu, Kenya — Local Systems That Listen
In western Kenya, local water committees in Kisumu began managing rural water kiosks using community input and mobile payments. These systems, backed by minimal tech and maximum trust, reduced water theft, increased maintenance response times, and gave residents real control. It’s a reminder that good governance isn’t just about investment — it’s about design that respects people.
4. Bolivia’s Water Warriors — When Communities Fight Back
In Cochabamba, Bolivia, a movement of citizens pushed back against water privatisation in the early 2000s. They didn’t just protest — they won. The water system was returned to public hands, and though challenges remain, it became one of the first major victories for water as a people’s right, not a corporate asset. That struggle helped spark global water justice activism.
Each of these examples comes from a different context — rich and poor, urban and rural, high-tech and low-tech. But the common thread is simple: where people are included, informed, and empowered, water solutions start to stick.
What Can We Actually Do Now?
We don’t need to wait for another breakthrough. We already have the tools — and we already know what works. The real issue is willpower. So here’s what governments, companies, and communities can do today, without excuses or delay.
1. Fix What’s Already Broken
In many cities, more water is lost through leaks than is actually delivered. Governments must prioritise repairing and maintaining existing infrastructure — especially in underserved areas. That means putting money into pumps, pipes, and plumbers, not just PR campaigns. We don’t need smarter water until we have working water.
2. Regulate AI’s Environmental Cost
Tech companies shouldn’t be allowed to expand unchecked while drawing millions of gallons from stressed water tables. Governments must demand transparency on how much water AI systems use, where it’s sourced from, and what alternatives exist. If AI is going to shape the future, it needs to stop draining the present.
3. Bring Sanitation Into the Core Budget
Toilets, menstrual health facilities, and waste systems can’t be afterthoughts. They’re critical infrastructure. Ministries of health, education, and planning must treat sanitation with the same priority as electricity or transport. No girl should drop out because of a lack of privacy and plumbing.
4. Stop Pricing the Poor Out of Water
Water pricing policies often punish the poorest households, while industry and elites enjoy subsidies or exemptions. Tariffs must be restructured to ensure affordability, not just profitability. And informal settlements must be formally recognised so that services can be extended without political obstruction.
5. Scale What’s Already Working
Rainwater harvesting, community-led water governance, off-grid filtration, and mobile payment kiosks aren’t theory — they’re proven. But they’re still under-funded and isolated. Donors and development agencies need to scale what’s local, what’s working, and what doesn’t rely on billion-dollar tech.
Personal Action: What You Can Do
You don’t need to be a policymaker to make a difference. Some of the most powerful changes start with awareness — and pressure. If you live in a place where water flows freely, that’s not guilt — that’s leverage. Use it.
1. Ask Real Questions at Work
If you work in tech, manufacturing, logistics, or food — your company uses water. Maybe a lot. Ask your team:
“Do we know how much water we use?” “Is it public?” “Could we use less — or reuse more?”
Silence is complicity. Curiosity is power.
2. Rethink What You Eat
We talk about carbon footprints. But your plate has a water footprint too. Beef, almonds, coffee, and avocados are some of the worst offenders. You don’t need to become a monk. Just know the cost of what’s on your fork — and make changes where you can.
3. Support People Doing the Hard Work
Local NGOs, community sanitation projects, and water rights activists don’t have the ad budgets of global brands — but they move the dial. Donate. Share. Show up. These are the people keeping justice alive where infrastructure has failed.
4. Demand Transparency From Big Tech
If AI companies want to reshape the world, the least they can do is tell us how much water they’re using to do it. Public pressure works. Add your voice — on LinkedIn, on platforms, in conversations. Push for disclosure, not just disruption.
5. Make It Normal to Talk About Water
Most people don’t think about water unless it runs out. Change that. Talk about it at home. In classrooms. On social media. The more visible this crisis becomes, the harder it is to ignore. Awareness doesn’t solve everything — but it cracks the door open for action.
One Last Thing
We don’t talk about water because most of us still have it.
That’s the brutal truth. If the taps run, if the shower’s warm, if the bottle’s full — we forget. But for billions, water isn’t background. It’s the main story. Every decision, every delay, every quiet compromise runs through it.
And here’s the twist: the people using the least water are the ones paying the highest price. It shouldn’t take a catastrophe to remind us what matters. But too often, it does.
So if this article sits with you — let it move you. To speak. To act. To question. Not tomorrow. Not when the headlines catch up. Now.
Because when the water runs out, it doesn’t trickle down. It vanishes fast. And once it’s gone, there’s no press release, no pivot plan, no app that can bring it back.
The world is thirsty. And justice doesn’t flow on its own.