The world entered an era of ‘global water bankruptcy’: Pumped Dry Film, 2018, exploiting & depleting fossil water globally for Industrial Agriculture
“Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.” United Nations
Post 1.5°C we lose the Goldilocks climate niche for growing food & more importantly grain
1.5°C is very different from pre-1.5 °C. Britain’s climate has entered a new era of months without rain and severe drought from April to October in Central England. Heatwaves started in May, and these were not driven by the “Godzilla” El Niño; this is just climate change. Britain, like the rest of the world, is in an age of water Bankruptcy. Britain’s food is grown on some of the most drought-impacted land.
Community Crisis Resilience Requires Skills
Preparedness is now more mainstream, and people want to know what to do, but they have been hearing the Green influencers constantly wheeling out these “tired old tropes every time anyone tries to talk about preparedness in Green circles. It’s tired and old because the Left and Anarchists reinvented preparedness (prepping) and called it “solidarity prepping”, “prepping together”, “Soliprepping” and “prosocial prepping”. It’s a radical alternative to the grifting far-right prepper who declares they are voting Reform.” Solidarity Prepping.
In exactly the same way that we are careful about how we communicate climate change and collapse, we need to be careful about how we communicate preparedness. It’s very easy to fall into Dunning-Krugerism about preparedness because people who want to control the narrative around preparedness want to be seen talking about preparedness publicly, even if they don’t know what they are doing or what preparedness means or how to do it. No one learns preparedness in a week. It’s a combination of “team sport”, new neural networks, muscle memory, and a deep knowledge of nature, ourselves, and our trigger responses to the internal mechanisms that keep us alive.
Every Solidarity Prepper has a different history, approach and style. I live a deeply simple, car-free, hyper-local life, but I am dependent on supermarkets and have access to locally grown food, too. But cost is always the issue with smaller growers. I also have other connections for food trading and sharing networks.
The difference between Solidarity Prepping and other Prepping is that I, the author, started with wilderness survival before I considered whether climate change could be survivable. I can use a compass and old-style Ordnance Survey maps, as well as celestial navigation. While I wouldn’t want to, I have the skills to live off the land long-term, and this helps inform the plants I have chosen for the famine garden, for planting my food forest, and for working towards a resilient garden and local landscape. I also have some extra food put by, but with a plan.
Preparedness: long-term survival on a rapidly changing planet requires planning now to support communities.
No prepper stockpiles food to give away, especially during an agricultural & water crisis in collapse. Sound bite: Preparedness by influencers new to the movement isn’t about giving good advice; it’s about feigning relevance. This is best left to those who know what they are doing to teach communities
We will be making Potage from whatever is available, fortified with some beans and rice or another grain or legume. We would share what’s in the cooking pot, but not what we have stored for long-term preparedness.
The Problem with suggesting that Solidarity Prepping is about buying food to share is that it’s just bizarre and not a clever way to organise resilient communities. Please don’t boil preparedness down to stockpiling, putting a water Butt and getting an allotment.
The Dunning-Kruger effect immediately: No prepper stockpiles food to give away, especially during an agricultural & water crisis where future procurement is uncertain.
This is why groups like the Climate Majority Project ask questions like this:
“What would it take to prepare our neighbourhoods honestly for the more severe conditions we will face?”
Then start making generalised statements which are not really true:
“Very soon, local resilience will become kitchen-table politics, with cost of living front and centre. To shape adaptation and resilience will be the defining political challenge of our time.” It already is, and the cost-of-living crisis, or, more precisely, austerity measures imposed by the state, is now compounded by climateflation and shrinkflation. While private mismanaged water companies tell customers to use less water. They will be telling us to shit less too soon. – that’s ok, solidarity prepping has a low-impact solution.- Compost toilets in your backyard.
The perfect storm is a combination of events which leads to a catastrophe. Included in the lead-up are some maladaptive adaptations and planning, because if the priority is dominating the narrative rather than actually understanding preparedness. The Climate Majority Project appears to aim to please the majority by not being too radical; it mentions rainwater harvesting and water butts almost as a passing thought: Humans need a minimum of 2 litres of water/day for survival; call it 3litres to include cooking. Most people add 10 litres for washing. A small rainwater Butt rainwater butt can be under 100 litres, and a large one 200litres. If the intention is to water the garden, then 1 water butt is not enough in Britain’s post-1.5C water-bankrupt climate. I have a capacity of 2,200 litres; I have been able to refill since the end of summer. It is possible to shower with less than 3 litres of water. In summer 2026, I used over 1,000 litres to water the garden.
Supply chains are already broken. The broken climate/food system is the major threat.
Local resilience groups are already seeking advice from Groups like the Climate Majority, who say stuff like this, which is also untrue: “Nobody is well prepared for what is coming, and there aren’t any magic bullets. Any readiness will be hard-won and painstakingly built. Turning towards the impacts that are coming, uncertain as they are, we must begin to practise – testing, learning and adapting as we go.“
Again, by pretending that there are not already people well ahead of the preparedness curve, the Climate Majority Project aims to dominate a conversation in which they have no expertise.
Least of all Rupert Read, but he is doing what most people who first learn about survival/preparedness: Wanting to share knowledge without grasping how little they knows as he tells people what he thinks mutal aid preparedness is about a stockpile and sharing it.
I have been planning for an agricultural collapse for over 10 years and learning survival skills for over 30. I’m not stockpiling expensive kit, but by learning skills, experimenting with foods for the future and planting wild staples. Learning skills for collapse, such as advanced First Aid and Mental Health First Aid, plus experience working in dangerous healthcare environments and developing an award-winning nature therapy project in a large teaching hospital. The people who are well prepared are those who have lived off the grid, in primitive environments, and know how to navigate dangerous situations fluidly. Personal adaptability to climate and ecological breakdown involves being physically fit, actively practising mindfulness, and spending long periods in nature practising wilderness skills and building a connection to nature. Survival skills and experimentation with plants in nature to find their uses. This teaches resourcefulness. While it’s true there are no magic bullets, there are some basic rules of preparedness: Basic needs: Calories, 2-3 litres of water/day for consumption and apparently 10 litres for washing. I can wash with 4! Shelter, warmth, and safety to sleep well. Putting by food is one of the oldest human pastimes.
What few people grasp is that when it comes to adaptation to a climate in flux, every time we adapt, we have to readapt and respond accordingly when things change again. For example, over the last 5 years, I have observed that changes in precipitation in the South of England have increased the dry season length by about 2 weeks per year. Hence, switching from 200 litres to 2000 litres of stored Rainwater. Hence, discussing wet-bulb temperatures and the impact of heat on agriculture.- The loss of the Goldilocks Climate Niche for agriculture — that alone drives a civilisation collapse.
The Climate Majority Project Reports do not discuss Britain being water-bankrupt.
I suspect that I am more prepared for collapse than they’d like to admit. But like I say, this is preparedness for the slide down the hill to unsurvivable climates and total collapse of the biosphere
Sources
Britain Is Water Bankrupt & Soon to be in Severe Food Deficit
Let’s have a conversation about what is actually required for community preparedness to work sustainably and long-term, and to include people who know more about community resilience and how we achieve it sensibly, as opposed to soundbites and attempts to look expert that fail dismally.
Solidarity prepping is common-sense climate preparedness. It costs me about £300/ year to run all this. I have a full-time job, and I fit everything else around it. If you find my work useful, support me by sharing posts from this blog and subscribing.
You can connect with all my content here: Linktree
I share this information publicly and openly, but I also expect credit where credit is due. Sharing skills and expertise free of charge with community resilience groups; however, I ask that people do the same. This knowledge and information are not to be commoditised.
Solidarity Prepping is about easing the downward slide to extinction; 5 degrees Celsius is unsurvivable, Hansen predicts 10C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River
https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/01/1166800
Food
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10248
https://www.earthblox.io/resources/what-the-uks-50-day-deluge-means-in-the-era-of-water-bankruptcy
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