Freshwater supplies are dwindling, according to the World Weather Organization
Published: Monday, Oct 7th 2024, 10:30
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According to a UN report, rivers around the world had the lowest water levels in 2023 than they have had for more than 30 years. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva reported that in each of the past five years, water levels were significantly below the long-term average.
According to a UN report, rivers around the world had the lowest water levels in 2023 than they have had for more than 30 years. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported in Geneva that in each of the past five years, the water levels were significantly below the long-term average.
According to the WMO, the cause is climate change, exacerbated by the El Niño weather phenomenon, which occurs naturally every few years and influences precipitation worldwide. 2023 was the hottest year since the beginning of industrialization and glaciers lost more ice than ever before in at least 50 years.
Not all rivers were affected to the same extent. According to the WMO, the Mississippi in the USA, the Amazon in South America and the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong rivers in Asia had less water than the long-term average, while East Africa, northern New Zealand, the Philippines and northern Europe had more.
Water as a canary
"Water is the canary in the coal mine of climate change," said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. "We are receiving distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts that are severely impacting lives, ecosystems and economies." In the past, canaries were taken into mines because they faint earlier than humans in the event of an increased concentration of potentially lethal carbon monoxide and therefore acted as an early warning system.
According to the UN, 3.6 billion people do not have enough water for at least one month a year - that is more than 40 percent of the world's population. According to model calculations, this figure is likely to rise to five billion by 2050.
Among other things, the report documents water levels in lakes and rivers, soil moisture and measurements of glaciers and snow. However, many countries were hardly able to contribute any data, and for one parameter only a good 30 countries were able to do so. In such cases, the WMO supplements the data with the help of model calculations. According to the WMO, more data urgently needs to be collected.
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