Baitings reservoir in Ripponden, West Yorkshire, in summer 2022, when the total stock of water in England’s reservoirs was at its lowest level since 1995. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

We do not favor panic button words in headlines; but when the cap fits, wear it:

‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’

While the world becomes drier, profit and pollution are draining our resources. We have to change our approach

The River Derwent in Cumbria has run dry in parts of the Borrowdale valley for the third consecutive year. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water. Sometimes, I swim while it’s raining, when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with the strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me. I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane, to drink from halfway through my swim. I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I’ve showered that morning. I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence. But, as I discovered, this won’t last. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water.

Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable. Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply. As surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits. It’s simple maths. Demand is outstripping supply.

Little old England manages to encompass many global water problems – scarcity, overabstraction, pollution, underinvestment, government and regulatory failings, environmental degradation and corporate misconduct – all within the confines of one small country in the far west of Europe.

The UK’s average annual rainfall is about 1,100mm, compared with less than 300mm in Pakistan or double figures in Egypt. However, despite our winter storms, significant parts of the UK are staring down the barrel of empty water butts. Much of that four-figure rainfall average is propped up by the rainy Highlands of Scotland, Wales and northern England. In south-east England, where I live, the average annual rainfall lingers about 600 mm – comparable with Lebanon or Kenya, and drier than Sydney, Australia. This also happens to be the UK’s most populated area, with about 18 million inhabitants packed into just 19,000 sq km, including London’s 1,500 sq km. And it’s drying up, fast. Government figures show that, in England, 28% of groundwater aquifers, the layers of porous sand and rock that hold water underground, and up to 18% of rivers and reservoirs, have more water taken out than is put back in. This is clearly unsustainable.

Not a single one of England’s rivers is classified as being in good ecological health – this includes chalk streams, a delicate habitat almost entirely unique to England. However, much of the public remains oblivious to a problem that we are all, at least in part, responsible for causing. More than half of the freshwater abstracted in the UK is for household use. The average British resident happily uses 153l of water a day, through showers, toilets, dishwashers, washing machines and garden hoses. Yet climate-change projections show that dry summers in England will increase by up to 50%, with the amount of water available reduced by at least 10-15%.

Freshwater shortages, once considered a local issue, are increasingly a global risk. In every annual risk report since 2012, the World Economic Forum has included water crisis as one of the top-five risks to the global economy. Half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – live in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, while half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.

There’s only ever the same, finite amount of water churning around in our water cycle. Every drop of water on Earth has been here since the beginning of time, constantly recycled. Up to 60% of the adult human body is water (even bone is a surprisingly splashy 31%). When you die and are cremated or buried, that water will be released again, to the atmosphere or the earth. We are as intimately connected to the water cycle as rivers and lakes are…

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