Climate Change Causing Havoc With Global Water Cycle: UN

AFP/APP

Geneva: Climate change is spurring increasingly erratic and extreme swings between deluge and drought globally, with cascading repercussions for societies, the United Nations warned on Thursday.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a report that the world’s water cycle was becoming ever more unpredictable, with shrinking glaciers, droughts, unbalanced river basins, and severe floods wreaking havoc.

“The world’s water resources are under pressure from growing demand, and at the same time, we are seeing more water-related hazards,” WMO chief Celeste Saulo told reporters in Geneva.

The agency’s annual State of Global Water Resources report “shows quite clearly that the water cycle has become increasingly erratic and extreme,” she said, pointing to the “cascading impacts on infrastructure, agriculture, energy, health, and economic activities.”

Last year was the hottest on record, leading to prolonged droughts in northern South America, the Amazon Basin, and southern Africa, the report said. Meanwhile, parts of central Africa, Europe, and Asia dealt with wetter weather than usual, facing devastating floods and deadly storms.

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Africa’s tropical zone experienced unusually heavy rainfall in 2024, resulting in around 2,500 deaths and displacing some four million people. Asia and the Pacific were hit by record-breaking rainfall and tropical cyclones, killing more than 1,000 people. Europe endured its most extensive flooding in more than a decade, with a third of river networks exceeding high flood thresholds, the report noted.

‘Clear imbalance’

WMO said 2024 marked the sixth consecutive year in which there had been a “clear imbalance” in the world’s river basins.

“Two-thirds have too much or too little water — reflecting the increasingly erratic hydrological cycle,” it said.

The organization also highlighted declining water quality in major lakes due to warmer weather, and reported that glaciers shrank across all regions for the third year in a row. Globally, 450 gigatonnes of ice were lost — enough to fill 180 million Olympic swimming pools.

This meltwater added about 1.2 millimetres (0.05 inches) to global sea levels in a single year, raising the flooding risk for hundreds of millions living in coastal zones. “From the 1970s until now, 9,000 gigatonnes have been lost, which is 25 millimetres of sea level rise,” WMO scientific officer Sulagna Mishra said.

According to the UN, 3.6 billion people worldwide currently face insufficient access to water for at least one month each year. This figure is expected to rise to more than five billion by 2050.

Stefan Uhlenbrook, head of WMO’s hydrology, water, and cryosphere division, stressed that “the total amount of water we have on this planet remains the same.”

But with “increasingly melting glaciers and also with over-abstracting groundwater… we lose more water from the continents, which flows to the sea, contributing to sea level rise.”

Mishra emphasized the urgent need to manage underground water systems (aquifers) and store freshwater from melting glaciers before it drains into the oceans. She also urged optimization of water use in agriculture, which accounts for 75 to 90 percent of all water abstracted.