Geneva, Oct. 7, (dpa/GNA) – Rivers worldwide had less water in 2023 than at any time in the last 30 years, according to a report by the United Nations weather agency.
The report, published on Sunday by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said that global water levels for the last five years have been well below the long-term average.
The fall in water levels is caused by climate change, it said, exacerbated by the El Niño weather phenomenon, which occurs naturally every few years and affects precipitation worldwide.
Last year was the hottest on record and glaciers lost more ice than they have done for at least 50 years, said the report.
Not all rivers have been equally affected. According to the WMO, the water levels were below the long-term average in the Mississippi basin in the United States, the Amazon basin in South America, and the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong river basins in Asia, as well as other rivers in East Africa, northern New Zealand, the Philippines and northern Europe.
“Water is the canary in the coal mine of climate change,” said WMO Secretary General Celeste Saulo, referring to the old tradition of taking a canary into a mine because the birds lose consciousness earlier than humans, serving as an early warning of potentially fatal levels of carbon monoxide in the mine.
“We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies … and yet we are not taking the necessary action,” she said.
According to UN data, 3.6 billion people – over 40% of the world’s population – do not have enough water for at least one month of the year. Model calculations suggest that this figure is likely to rise to 5 billion by 2050.
The WMO report documents water levels in lakes and rivers, soil moisture, and measurements of glaciers and snow, among other things.
However, many countries were unable to contribute data to the study, with one parameter including data for only 30 countries. In such cases, the WMO uses model calculations to fill in the gaps, but urges for more data to urgently be collected.
GNA