Erratic water cycle exposing people to deluge and drought: WMO report
The WMO report reveals erratic water cycles causing floods and droughts, impacting economies and societies globally, with only one-third of river basins normal.
The water cycle has become erratic and extreme, exposing people to deluge and drought, a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) flagged on Thursday.
The report highlights the cascading impacts of too much or too little water on economies and society. The State of Global Water Resources report finds that only about one-third of the global river basins had “normal” conditions in 2024. The rest were either above or below normal – the sixth consecutive year of such imbalance.
In India, 385 deaths were reported, caused by extreme rainfall on July 30 2024 in Kerala, triggering extreme landslides. River basins such as the Godavari, Krishna, Ganges, and parts of the upstream Indus showed above-normal discharge conditions.
Last year was the third consecutive year on record where there was widespread ice loss across all glaciated regions: with 450 Gt lost – the equivalent of a huge block of ice 7 kilometers tall, 7 km wide, and 7 km deep, or enough water to fill 180 million Olympic swimming pools, WMO has estimated.
That much meltwater adds about 1.2 millimetres to global sea level in a single year, contributing to flooding risk for hundreds of millions of people living in coastal zones.
Record mass loss occurred in Scandinavia, Svalbard, and North Asia, while some regions like the Canadian Arctic and Greenland periphery saw more moderate losses.
Many small-glacier regions have already reached or are about to pass the peak water point (when a glacier’s melting reaches its maximum annual runoff after which this decreases due to glacier shrinkage), WMO said.
At the other extreme, the Amazon Basin and other parts of South America, as well as southern Africa were gripped by severe drought in 2024, whilst there were wetter-than-normal conditions in central, western and eastern Africa, parts of Asia and Central Europe. This was mainly contributed by 2024 being the hottest year on record and an El Niño event which impacted major river basins.
In the past six years only about one-third of the global river catchment area had normal discharge conditions compared to the 1991-2020 average. This means that two thirds have too much or too little water – reflecting the increasingly erratic hydrological cycle.
There was much below-normal discharge across key river basins including the Amazon, São Francisco, Paraná, and Orinoco in South America, and the Zambezi, Limpopo, Okavango, Orange basins in southern Africa. Extensive flooding occurred in West African basins in Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad, Volta). There was above normal river discharge across Central Europe and parts of Asia, swelling major basins including the Danube, Ganges, Godavari, and Indus, WMO flagged.
HT reported on August 27 that the southwest monsoon, once considered one of the most stable features of the Indian subcontinent’s climate,is rapidly changing, altered by the smothering effect of increasing moisture.
This year’s monsoon disasters in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir have given a peek into what India can expect over the next few decades.
An increasing number of scientific papers over the past few years have concluded that though the monsoon circulation is weakening, global warming is leading to an increase in moisture which is triggering extreme rainfall events along with longer dry periods during monsoon months, which authorities, farmers, and people in general are not prepared for.
“Water sustains our societies, powers our economies and anchors our ecosystems. And yet the world’s water resources are under growing pressure and – at the same time – more extreme water-related hazards are having an increasing impact on lives and livelihoods. Reliable, science-based information is more important than ever before because we cannot manage what we do not measure,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo in a statement.
