The world's water resources face growing pressure from climate change while emergencies involving the life-giving resource are increasingly impacting lives and livelihoods according to the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
WMO secretary general Celeste Saulo said, “Water-related hazards continue to cause major devastation this year. The latest examples are the devastating monsoon flooding in Pakistan, floods in South Sudan and the deadly flash floods in the Indonesian island of Bali. And unfortunately, we see no end to this trend.”
Ms Saulo said that these emergencies have been happening amid increasingly warm air temperatures, which allow more water to be held in the atmosphere leading to heavier rainfall.
The WMO has also published a new report on the state of the world’s waterways, snow and ice which notes that 2024 was the hottest in 175 years of observation, with the annual mean surface temperature reaching 1.55 °C above the pre-industrial baseline from 1850 to 1900.
An example of the increasingly erratic behaviour of the world’s water cycle is the extremely heavy rainfall that has affected parts of Himachal Pradesh or Jammu and Kashmir in India.
WMO scientific officer Asia Dr Sulagna Mishra said, “The region saw extremely heavy rainfall when it was not expected; the monsoon came early. So, this is what we are talking about as the unpredictability of the system is growing, more and more.”
The WMO report’s other findings confirm wetter-than-normal conditions over central-western Africa, Lake Victoria in Africa, Kazakhstan and southern Russia, central Europe, Pakistan and northern India, southern Iran and north-eastern China in 2024.
Melting glaciers continue to be a major concern for meteorologists because of the speed at which they are disappearing and their existential threat to communities downstream and in coastal areas.
“Glaciers lost 450 gigatonnes, this is the equivalent of a huge block of ice seven kilometres in height, seven kilometres wide and seven kilometres deep, or 180 million Olympic swimming pools, enough to add about 1.2 millimetres to global sea level, increasing the risk of floods for hundreds of millions of people on the coasts.”
The report also highlights the critical need for improved data-sharing on streamflow, groundwater, soil moisture and water quality, which remain heavily under-monitored.