Water security as financial resilience

There is a growing water crisis on multiple fronts. In early 2026, United Nations scientists declared an era of global water bankruptcy as systems hit breaking point. The social and health implications of this are widely understood, but the economic and financial risks are too often missing from the conversation. A new report by WWF finds that, when climate and nature risks are considered separately, without fully integrating freshwater considerations, important systemic risks can be overlooked and gaps in risk management can build up. In this episode, Carolin Carella, research lead at the WWF Greening Financial Regulation Initiative, and Jessica Smith, head of nature at the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative, join Sarah Moloney, editorial director at OMFIF. They examine the key findings of the report and consider what financial institutions, supervisors and regulators can do to help ensure a financially resilient and water-secure future. Read the WWF report, ‘Navigating towards water resilience’, which highlights the materiality of water insecurity to price and financial stability and the possible steps for central banks and financial supervisors to address water-related risks in their work, and the UNEP FI Risk Centre's flagship report, ‘The landscape of sustainability risk integration’, which assessed the extent to which sustainability risks are being integrated by the global banking sector.