Water connects climate, soil, forests, food, health, sanitation, biodiversity, settlement and the future of civilisation itself. This page brings together Whole Life Times' developing coverage of the global water crisis — and the practical possibilities for restoring the living water cycle upon which all life depends.
The global water crisis is often described in terms of scarcity: too little clean water in too many places. Yet the deeper story also involves flooding, pollution, depleted aquifers, damaged wetlands, changing rainfall, warming oceans, melting ice, degraded soils and landscapes that have lost some of their capacity to receive, hold, cleanse and slowly release water.
A whole-life perspective therefore asks us to see water not merely as a commodity to be extracted, consumed and discarded, but as part of a planetary circulation linking atmosphere, land, oceans, ecosystems and every living being.
Why the Future of Humanity Depends on Restoring the Water Cycle, by Denis McCarthy, is a forthcoming book exploring water scarcity, flooding, pollution, ecosystem degradation and disruption of the natural water cycle — together with practical pathways toward restoration, conservation and ecological sanitation.
Explore the forthcoming book →The Waterless Sanitation Assistance Fund helps bring safe, dignified and environmentally sustainable sanitation to communities that need it most but cannot afford it, connecting the water crisis with practical humanitarian action.
Learn about and support the WSAF →A forthcoming Special Edition of Whole Life Times will bring together perspectives on water as one of the defining whole-system issues of our time. The Global Water Crisis will feature on its cover.
Explore Special Editions →The Special Edition will provide a place to bring together the many dimensions of the water story — ecological, climatic, humanitarian, technological, cultural and personal — while asking what becomes possible when we understand those dimensions as parts of one interconnected system.
The cover shown here is a temporary concept placeholder. It can be replaced with the final Special Edition cover without changing the page structure.
The 2026 United Nations Water Conference will be co-hosted by the United Arab Emirates and Senegal at the ADNEC Exhibition Centre in Abu Dhabi. Its mandate is to accelerate implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 6: ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
For Whole Life Times, the Conference provides an important international context for examining the global water crisis not as an isolated environmental issue, but as a challenge connecting health, sanitation, ecology, climate, equity, finance and the future.
Explore the UN Water Conference →Water security and sanitation cannot be separated. Conventional sewerage has delivered enormous public-health benefits, but it also depends upon water, infrastructure, energy and treatment capacity. In places where those resources are scarce, unreliable or unaffordable, different solutions may be needed.
Waterless and ecological sanitation are not the whole answer to the global water crisis. They are, however, an important part of a larger transition toward systems that protect health and dignity while using water more wisely and working more closely with ecological realities.
To protect water is to protect the relationships through which life continues: between atmosphere and soil, river and ocean, forest and rainfall, sanitation and health, present generations and those still to come.
The Global Water CrisisSupport the WSAFWLT Special Editions