The world’s rivers faced the driest year in three decades in 2023, UN says

A part of the Negro River is dry at the port in Manaus, Amazonas state, Brazil, Friday, Oct. 4, 2024, amid severe drought. (AP Photo/Edmar Barros)

The U.N. weather agency is reporting that 2023 was the driest year in more than three decades for the world’s rivers, as the record-hot year underpinned a drying up of water flows and contributed to prolonged droughts in some places.

The World Meteorological Organization also says glaciers that feed rivers in many countries suffered the largest loss of mass in the last five decades, warning that ice melt can threaten long-term water security for millions of people globally.

“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change. We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, releasing the report on Monday.

She said rising temperatures had in part led the hydrological cycle to become “more erratic and unpredictable” in ways that can produce “either too much or too little water” through both droughts and floods.

Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of World Meteorological Organization (WMO), presents the WMO’s State of Global Water Resources report during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

The weather agency, citing figures from UN Water, says some 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water for at least one month a year — and that figure is expected to rise to 5 billion by 2050.

The world faced the hottest year on record in 2023, and the summer of this year was also the hottest summer ever — raising warning signs for a possible new annual record in 2024.

“In the (last) 33 years of data, we had never such a large area around the world which was under such dry conditions,” said Stefan Uhlenbrook, director of hydrology, water and cryosphere at WMO.

Barges float in the Mississippi River as a portion of the riverbed is exposed, on Sept. 15, 2023, in St. Louis. The U.N. weather agency is reporting that 2023 was the driest year in more than three decades for the world’s rivers, as the record-hot year underpinned a drying up of water flows and contributed to prolonged droughts in some places. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

WMO called for improvements in data collection and sharing to help clear up the real picture for water resources and help countries and communities take action in response.

The report said the southern United States, Central America and South American countries Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay faced widespread drought conditions and “the lowest water levels ever observed in Amazon and in Lake Titicaca,” on the border between Peru and Bolivia.

WMO said half of the world faced dry-river-flow conditions last year.