Water-Energy Nexus - The Closed Budget: Who Draws From a Bankrupt Account?
We have spent thirty years talking about the water crisis. The word was accurate and it was useful, and it is now the thing standing in our way — because a crisis is, by definition, a deviation. It implies a normal state we departed from and can return to. It licenses the language of emergency, of response, of recovery. It allows us to believe that the water story has an end, and that the end looks like the beginning.
It does not. In January 2026, at United Nations Headquarters, UNU-INWEH published Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era. Its argument is simple and it changes everything. In much of the world we are no longer overdrawing our water income — the rain, the rivers, the renewable flows. We are liquidating the capital: the aquifers accumulated over millennia, the glaciers, the wetlands, the living soils that hold and release water. This is not a shortage. It is insolvency. And insolvency is not a phase you recover from. It is a condition you administer.
The moment we accept the accounting metaphor, the entire conversation reorganizes itself. Because a bankrupt account is a closed budget, and inside a closed budget there are no new demands — only transfers. Every litre allocated to one purpose is a litre withdrawn from another. Water stops being an environmental subject and becomes what it has always secretly been: the instrument through which a society decides what it values.
This conference begins there. Hosted by FAO global roadmap, UNUinWEH, Venice Climate Week, ICOMOS, University of Salerno, SEEDS, Urban Water Security, IUAV.
Speakers:
Kaveh Madani — Director, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH); Research Professor, CUNY CREST Institute; 2026 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.
David Laborde — Director, Agrifood Economics and Policy Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Vincenzo Naddeo — Director, Sanitary Environmental Engineering Division (SEED), University of Salerno; Affiliate Associate Professor, University of Washington; Affiliate Professor, Tamkang University.
Meisha Hunter — President, International Scientific Committee on Water and Heritage, ICOMOS–ISC Water.
Francesco Musco — Full Professor of Urban Planning, Iuav University of Venice; UNESCO Chair on Heritage and Urban Regeneration; President, CORILA.
Simone Venturini — Mayor of Venice.
Stefano Pisani — Mayor of Pollica; ANCI Delegate for Relations with UNESCO on Innovative Development Models for Marginal Areas; Director, BLUERA Initiative.
Renzo Macelloni — Mayor of Peccioli.
Sandrine Dixson-Declève — Honorary President, The Club of Rome; Executive Chair, Earth4All.
Sara Roversi — Founder & President, Future Food Institute.
Riccardo Luna — Curato Venice Climate Week.