WATER BANKRUPTCY

Water is the New Oil

I have been saying since 1990 that water is the new oil.

In a 1998 interview I put it directly: "Today as in the past we fight battles over access to oil, soon those same wars will erupt over access to clean water." The earliest surviving published record of the line dates to 2014, speaking to Laissez Faire London, where I called water "the oil of the future." A year later: "the most mismanaged asset our civilisation has." The proposition recurs in 2016, 2018 and 2019, and by 2023, on Considering Art, it had settled into the form I had been using for years: "water is the new oil."

The idea was never mine alone. In 1985 Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned that the next Middle East war could be fought over water. In 1995 World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin made the prediction still quoted today: the wars of the next century would be fought over water. In 2001 Kofi Annan warned that competition for freshwater might become a source of conflict. Those statements emerged from diplomacy and economics. Mine emerged through an artistic practice — through four decades in which water has moved through the studio as subject, material, optical mechanism, environmental concern and physical system.

That duration is what the practice actually establishes. Not priority. Not proof of an early insight.

The question now is no longer whether the warnings of the late twentieth century were prescient.

Something more consequential has happened.

The language has changed.

Mycenaean, from Goya reborn in water, 2025
analogue photograph
35 ¹³/₃₂  × 47  ⁷/₃₂ inches
90 × 120 cm

Bankruptcy

In January 2026, environmental scientist Kaveh Madani and the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health proposed that parts of the world had moved beyond water stress and even beyond water crisis.

They called the new condition water bankruptcy.

The distinction matters.

Water stress describes severe pressure while recovery remains possible. Crisis describes an acute condition from which a system may still return. Bankruptcy describes something more profound: persistent over-withdrawal combined with irreversible, or prohibitively expensive, losses of the natural capital upon which water availability depends. UNU describes river basins and aquifers increasingly losing the ability to return to their historical normal.

The metaphor is financial, but the losses are physical.

An aquifer is drawn down faster than it can recharge. Wetlands disappear. Soil loses its ability to retain water. Rivers are over-allocated. Lakes contract. Pollution removes usable water from circulation. Glacial storage diminishes.

The balance sheet still contains water, but the mechanisms through which usable freshwater is renewed have been impaired.

Madani’s assessment places some four billion people under severe water scarcity for at least one month each year. His larger argument is that in an increasing number of basins and aquifers the historical baseline itself can no longer be assumed to be recoverable.

This is an important distinction because the Earth is not simply running out of water.

Water remains.

It evaporates, freezes, melts, condenses, falls, flows, infiltrates and returns. But the existence of water and the availability of usable freshwater in a particular place, at a particular moment, in a condition capable of sustaining life are entirely different propositions.

A lake can exist and be dying.

An aquifer can remain beneath a city while the ground above it subsides.

A river can continue to flow while failing to deliver what the communities, agriculture and ecosystems along it require.

A glacier can contain water while its changing physical state creates an entirely different set of consequences downstream.

What is being exhausted, therefore, is not simply a quantity.

It is a set of conditions.

What happens when the conditions that sustain a system are progressively exhausted?

Kaveh Madani receiving the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize.

Conditions

This is a question I recognise from the studio.

I do not begin with the intention of making an image. I begin by establishing conditions.

Water. Light. Frequency. Containment. Duration.

In Cymatic Water + Light, a contained surface is subjected to frequency. Energy enters the liquid. At particular thresholds the system reorganises into standing waves, nodal fields and temporary structures. The changing surface redistributes light. Analogue film records the consequence.

The image is not a visualisation imposed upon the event.

The event produces the image.

Across the practice the variables change, but the structure remains remarkably constant: the artist builds a system; it is activated; matter responds; form appears; the camera records the moment; the system collapses; the photograph remains.

This distinction has become increasingly central to my practice. Authorship does not reside only in determining an outcome. It can reside in constructing a system within which an outcome becomes possible.

The resulting photograph is evidence that the system briefly achieved a particular state.

Then the frequency changes.

The water stills.

The structure disappears.

What remains is the photograph.

The scale changes, but the underlying physical lesson remains useful.

Systems respond to conditions.

Change energy, resistance, temperature, pressure, duration or containment and the system reorganises.

At planetary scale the variables become precipitation, extraction, agriculture, pollution, population, infrastructure, temperature, soil, political boundaries and time.

The complexity is vastly greater.

The principle remains unforgiving.

Physical systems do not negotiate with the stories we tell about them.

Plate 0162, from Cymatic Water + Light, 2026
analogue photograph
47 ¼ × 70 ⅞ inches
120 × 180 cm

Oil + Water

The collision between water and extraction entered my work physically in Siberia.

In Oil + Water, which began in 2013, crude oil direct from the ground and the purest river water on the planet were brought together under extreme winter conditions. Freezing temporarily held the materials within structures that could exist only under a narrow range of physical conditions.

They were unstable from the moment they were made.

Oil would not become water. Water would not absorb oil. Temperature created a temporary equilibrium between substances determined to separate. The process, enthalpy of fusion, normally achievable only within a science laboratory, was created in the field.

The photographs record that interval.

The work carries an environmental argument alongside the thermodynamic one. Oil dispersing through river water is a physical consequence of industrial activity, while the photographs catch the system forming, failing and transforming as spectacular fissures and gas pockets form within the experiment under intense physical pressure.

At the time I was already speaking publicly about the political relationship between these materials, so fundamental to everything we know and experience on Earth.

Oil had organised much of the twentieth century. Access to it had influenced borders, alliances, economies and wars in a worrying repetitive pattern. Water appeared to me increasingly capable of acquiring a comparable geopolitical weight.

But there was always a weakness in the analogy.

Oil and water may both be described as resources, but they are not equivalent resources.

Civilisation built a dependency upon oil.

Life begins with a dependency upon water.

That difference would become more important to me later.

For the moment, in Siberia, I was interested in the confrontation itself: two materials upon which very different systems of human dependence had been built, forced into the same physical object.

The proposition remained contained.

Then, in 2019, it became architectural.

Archytas, from Oil + Water, 2014
analogue photograph
47 ¼ × 35 ⅜ inches
120 × 90 cm

Dark Vat

Dark Vat occupied a disused photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk.

At its centre was a vast black water reflection pool.

The work had changed in scale.

Water was no longer simply the medium through which an image was constructed. It became an environment: black, reflective, spatial, something around which bodies and architecture reorganised themselves in a continual ebb and flow.

And the blackness mattered.

On Russian national television, broadcast live from within the studio in May 2019, the work was explained in terms that brought together the two materials I had been discussing for years. The pool referred to the wider problem of water, described as a scarce resource and a cause of conflict. Its blackness simultaneously alluded to oil.

In a separate Yenisei TV interview from the same period, I returned explicitly to the historical comparison: companies and nations had fought over oil, and now the battle for water would begin. The archive holds both broadcasts as distinct 2019 records.

But the first account is more important to me now.

Because the argument was no longer merely being spoken.

It had been built.

A thought that had circulated through interviews had acquired volume, surface, weight and architecture.

A body of black water stood simultaneously for itself and for something else.

Yet standing beside it also exposed the inadequacy of the comparison.

Water refuses to remain symbolic.

It reflects the building above it. It carries light. It evaporates. It supports organisms. It enters bodies. It falls from the atmosphere and moves through soil and stone. It crosses political boundaries without recognising them.

The further I worked with water as a physical system, the less satisfactory it became to understand it principally through metaphor.

Dark Vat therefore sits at an important point in my own thinking.

Statement became material.

Material became environment.

And once the proposition reached the scale of an environment, the larger system became impossible to ignore.

Dark Vat, Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, 2019
black water reflection pool installation with holographic projection
1300 × 2700 × 12 cm.

When Systems Fail

Mountains are among the clearest places in which that larger system can be observed.

They provide an estimated 55 to 60 per cent of global annual freshwater flows. Around two billion people depend upon mountain waters. Ice and snow act as storage, holding water and releasing it over time.

Change the storage mechanism and the consequence travels downstream.

The World Meteorological Organization reported that 2024 was the third consecutive year of widespread glacier loss across every glacier region. Around 450 gigatonnes were lost in that year alone. Only about one third of global river basins experienced normal conditions.

UNESCO estimates that between 26 and 41 per cent of mountain glacier mass is at risk by 2100 across warming scenarios of 1.5°C to 4°C.

These figures can become abstract very quickly.

Then a physical system changes violently.

On 27 August 2026, Nature reported on the catastrophic collapse of a glacier along the Nepal–Tibet border. Ice and rock generated a massive landslide and flash flood through the Bhotekoshi river system. The collapse produced a magnitude 5.2 seismic event. Downstream, ICIMOD recorded the Trishuli rising by approximately nine metres within thirty minutes at Galchhi. The human toll continued to rise rapidly after the first scientific reports were published.

It is important not to make the event prove more than the evidence currently allows.

Researchers were still investigating the precise relationship between warming and this particular collapse. The catastrophe needs no rhetorical embellishment.

Its significance here is physical.

A change high in a mountain system propagated through ice, rock, gravity and water into settlements far downstream.

The event was not contained at its point of origin.

Systems rarely are.

This is one reason the language of bankruptcy is so useful. It asks us to stop treating each drought, flood, failed harvest, shrinking lake or depleted aquifer as an isolated emergency.

They may instead be entries in the same account.

Aftermath of the Nepal–Tibet glacier collapse and flash flood, Rasuwa district, Nepal, 26–27 August 2026. Image courtesy Al Jazeera.

Water and Conflict

And so I return to the statement with which I began.

Will wars be fought over water?

The evidence demands a more interesting answer than the prediction.

The Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology distinguishes between water acting as a trigger of conflict, a weapon within conflict, or a casualty of conflict. For 2024 alone it recorded 420 events, nearly 20 per cent more than in 2023 and 78 per cent more than in 2022.

Those figures are serious.

But they do not establish that water scarcity mechanically produces war.

Shared water has repeatedly generated cooperation as well as conflict. The very fact that rivers and aquifers cross borders creates forms of mutual dependency that states cannot remove through political declaration.

Kofi Annan’s own language is instructive here.

In 2001 he warned that fierce competition for freshwater might become a source of conflict and war. In February 2002, addressing World Water Day, he developed the proposition. Water problems, he said, “need not be only a cause of tension”; they could also become a “catalyst for cooperation”.

That development matters.

A statesman who had publicly warned about conflict returned to the same subject and recognised that shared dependency could generate another outcome.

The question is therefore not simply whether water causes wars.

Water intersects with borders, agriculture, energy, poverty, infrastructure, historical grievances and political power. In the Indus, Nile, Helmand, Tigris and Euphrates systems, hydrology cannot be separated cleanly from sovereignty or history.

Water changes the conditions within which those relationships operate.

Scarcity can intensify an existing dispute. A dam can alter the balance between upstream and downstream states. Destroyed infrastructure can turn water into a casualty of war. Control of supply can make it a weapon.

Cooperation over a shared basin can equally create a channel of communication where others have failed.

This is where my own earlier language now requires development. “For many, many years I’ve stated that water is the new oil. Very soon we will go to war over access to clean water,” I said in 2023. I would not erase that statement. Nor the one I date to 1998.

They belong to the history of the practice.

But the evidence now asks something more difficult of them.

The important question is not whether a prediction can be proved correct.

It is whether the conditions that made the prediction imaginable are becoming more severe, and whether those conditions can still be changed.

The Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology records 2,750 water-related conflict events across 4,500 years of recorded history. courtesy Pacific Institute.

Changing the Conditions

My relationship with the Maldives reaches back to the 1980s.

In 1986 I undertook a nine-month sea expedition through the atolls by sea kayak, using a craft I made myself specifically for the arduous task. More than thirty years later, in 2017, I returned to the same navigable path to complete the series Visions from the Shoreline, this time on a five-month journey that deliberately revisited that earlier passage in reverse, south to north.

The intervening decades made change difficult to overlook.

Water there is not an abstraction. Geography compresses dependency. Freshwater, waste, imported material, tourism, energy and the ocean exist within an unusually exposed system.

Visions from the Shoreline was conceived within that context. Twenty works from the project were subsequently donated towards the development of what became Makers Place, contributing approximately US$100,000 towards the facility and its associated environmental work.

The donation connected an artwork made through a journey across water to a piece of practical infrastructure intended to alter what happened to materials on those islands.

Makers Place opened at Soneva Fushi in 2021, developed with Soneva and Soneva Namoona as a recycling studio capable of transforming discarded plastic and aluminium into artworks, useful objects and building material. Independent coverage confirms both the twenty-work contribution and the project’s wider community and environmental purpose. It is still operational today.

The facility itself became a constructed system.

Material enters.

It is sorted, washed and processed.

A closed-loop wash and preparation system reduces pressure on local freshwater. VOC and particulate extraction address emissions from plastics processing. Tooling converts discarded material into another usable state. Those principles remain central to the subsequent Makers Place system developed through Distil Ennui Studio.

Within the first three days of the original facility’s operation it processed 15,000 aluminium cans, a figure reported independently by both Paradise and Sublime.

The number matters because it describes movement through a system.

Waste is normally discussed at the end of a process.

Makers Place required us to begin further upstream.

Where does a material come from?

Why does it arrive?

What happens after consumption?

What infrastructure is absent?

What can be built locally?

What happens to the water used in the process?

What conditions would have to change for a discarded object to cease being waste?

The distinction between artwork and infrastructure becomes less stable at that point.

This movement through Distil Ennui Studio from object towards constructed social and material conditions has continued elsewhere, including Renaciendo, where an abandoned Carmelite convent in rural Spain, closed for more than 170 years, was reopened through artwork, architectural intervention, voluntary labour and cultural leadership. The lighting for the project went through the same systems process: waste material, in this case beer cans recovered from the natural landscape, was collected and melted to form state-of-the-art lighting modules.

The same thought that governs the photograph operates at another scale.

A system is established.

Inputs enter it.

Material responds.

An outcome emerges.

The difference is that here the purpose is not simply to witness the consequence.

It is to change it.

This matters when confronted by a phrase as severe as water bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy can sound terminal. Madani’s argument is more useful than that. Recognising that a historical baseline has been lost does not absolve us from acting. It changes what responsible action means: transparent accounting, limits on further depletion, protection of aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers and glaciers, and forms of transition that recognise unequal exposure and vulnerability.

The conditions have changed.

They can change again.

1986 and 2017 Maldives expeditions, travelling north to south, then thirty years later in the reverse direction. 


Alexander James Hamilton, Visions from the Shoreline.

Makers Place, Soneva Fushi, 5.1153°N, 73.0730°E.
processing single-use plastic & aluminium waste in a closed-loop wash station

Beyond Oil

For years I described water as the new oil.

The comparison did its work.

It spoke about scarcity. Value. Control. Mismanagement. Unequal access. Political leverage. It allowed something regarded in much of the industrialised world as endlessly available to be understood as strategically vulnerable.

And in that sense I still recognise the argument.

But the work eventually outgrew the comparison.

Oil is something industrial civilisation learned to depend upon.

Water is one of the conditions that allowed civilisation to exist in the first place.

Oil can be substituted by other forms of energy.

Water has no substitute.

Its value is not created by markets, even though markets attempt to price it. Its importance is not conferred by states, even though states attempt to control it. It does not acquire significance because it crosses a border.

The border arrived much later.

This is why Madani’s use of bankruptcy interests me so much.

Like oil, bankruptcy is an economic metaphor applied to a physical system.

It gives us a language for recognising that withdrawals have exceeded replenishment, that natural capital has been consumed and that obligations have accumulated which the system may no longer be capable of meeting.

But eventually this metaphor also reaches its limit.

A bankrupt company can disappear.

A financial debt can be written down.

A currency can be replaced.

A civilisation cannot negotiate with a depleted aquifer.

Working with water has taught me this repeatedly.

I can construct the vessel. I can introduce light. I can alter frequency, duration and temperature. I can establish a field in which an event becomes possible.

But I cannot instruct the water what form to take.

The system resolves according to its conditions.

This has become one of the central propositions of my practice: the photograph is the material consequence of something that occurred. Matter behaved under particular conditions; the event passed; the photograph is what remains.

Perhaps water bankruptcy asks us to recognise something similar at another scale.

The drought is a consequence.

The shrinking lake is a consequence.

The collapsing aquifer is a consequence.

Conflict may become a consequence.

Cooperation can also become a consequence.

None appears from nowhere.

They emerge from conditions.

In the late 1990s I was already writing about the relationship between oil, water and future conflict. In 2014 I described water as the most mismanaged asset our civilisation possesses. In 2019 I stood beside a vast pool of black water in Siberia that made the relationship between water, oil, scarcity and conflict physically present. In 2026 Madani has given the contemporary condition another name.

Bankruptcy.

I do not think these formulations cancel one another.

They form a progression.

The comparison with oil made scarcity and political value visible.

Bankruptcy makes accumulated depletion and irreversibility visible.

The physical practice has led me somewhere further still.

Water is not simply an asset within the system.

It is not simply the commodity that might replace oil as the defining resource of a century.

It is one of the conditions upon which the system depends.

The question is no longer only what happens when those conditions are exhausted.

It is what conditions we are prepared to change before they are.

Oil + Water, sculpture work created from frozen river water and crude oil. 57.8928°N, 56.7838°E, Krai River, Siberia.