WMO: 2023 marked the driest year for global rivers in over three decades

2023 marked the driest year for global rivers in over three decades amd currently 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water at least a month per year and this is expected to increase to more than five billion by 2050, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced on Monday. In a press conference from Geneva, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo emphasized that 2023 not only experienced record high temperatures but also highlighted the critical connection between water availability and climate change risks, it said. She noted that extreme weather patterns including heavy rainfall accelerated glacier melt floods and droughts are causing substantial damage to lives ecosystems and economies. Saulo called for immediate global action to face these hydrological events that pose a significant long-term threat to water security for millions of people. Saulo also stressed that the state of the world's freshwater resources is poorly understood. "We cannot manage what we do not measure, " she stated, underscoring the need for enhanced monitoring data sharing and international cooperation to improve water management practices. According to WMOÂ's 2023 report "The State of Global Water Resource", glaciers lost more than 600 Gigatonnes of water the worst in 50 years of observations according to preliminary data for September 2022 - August 2023. The report highlighted that this severe loss is mainly due to extreme melting in western North America and the European Alps where Switzerland's glaciers have lost about 10 percent of their remaining volume over the past two years. The report further emphasized that the last five years have witnessed below-average river flows combined with low reservoir water levels which may result in reduced water availability for agriculture ecosystems and local communities. These patterns could exacerbate global water supply pressures in the years to come. The report also detailed extreme hydrological events including floods in parts of Africa and Asia. These flo ods were linked to the transition from La (Nina) to (El Nino) in mid-2023 alongside climate change driven by human activity. According to the report, Africa was the most impacted in terms of human casualties. In Libya two dams collapsed due to a major flood in September 2023 claiming more than 11,000 lives and affecting 22 percent of the population. Floods also affected the Greater Horn of Africa Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda Mozambique and Malawi. The report seeks to create an extensive global dataset of hydrological variables which includes observed and modelled data from a wide array of sources. It aligns with the focus of the "global Early Warnings for All initiative" launched by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in March 2022 on improving data quality and access for water-related hazard monitoring and forecasting and providing early warning systems for all by 2027. Source: Kuwait News Agency