Earth’s rivers running dry

World water resources shrinking - 4th November 2024

Immediate action is imperative in response to the Earth's diminishing freshwater supplies, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It comes hot on the heels of the organization's "State of Global Water Resources" evaluation which found the world's rivers are dwindling at the most accelerated rate in three decades.

While swathes of land in North, Central and South America were struck by droughts in 2023, and water levels in the Amazon and Mississippi fell to record lows, on the other side of the world in Asia, the same fate befell the Ganges and Mekong.

Likewise, in China the previous year, the mighty Yangtze was bone-dry in parts, leaving its banks and bed exposed and its tributaries parched. For the first time in nine years, a countrywide drought was announced. Sichuan, home to 84 million residents and a province with 80 percent of electric capacity fuelled by hydropower, witnessed how the river's diminishing force suspended power supplies to factories for six days.

The flip side of the coin is that some areas, including the east of Africa, the Philippines and New Zealand's North Island have recently experienced extreme flooding.

Human-induced climate change appears to exacerbate the onus of naturally occurring weather phenomena like El Niño and La Niña, rendering them almost impossible to forecast.

Celeste Saulo, Secretary General of the WMO, recognises that the hydrological cycle has been accelerated as the direct consequence of warming temperatures, leaving Earth at the mercy of either too little or too much water. With freshwater supplies jeopardized by these severe conditions, UN-Water has declared that presently 3.6 billion people endure a minimum of one month of inadequate water supplies annually. This figure will have swollen to five billion by 2050.

"Water is the canary in the coalmine" explained Saulo, adding that extreme rainfall, floods and droughts are "distress signals" which in turn "wreak a heavy toll on lives and ecosystems."

Given that the vast majority of human beings depend on rivers for water consumption, irrigation, energy generation and shipping, Saulo states that improved monitoring is warranted to grasp "the true state of the world's freshwater resources".