world

According to a report on the global water resources recently released by the World Meteorological Organization, uncommon phenomena were observed in 2024 that the water flow got excessively greater or smaller in about 60 percent of river basins. Water circulation is becoming unstable due to an increase in the two extreme phenomena of drought and flood in all parts of the world.

The report said that in the past six years alone, only one third of river basins remained stable within the “normal” range as compared to the average water flow between 1991 and 2020.

In 2024, the water flow became very smaller in the basins of the Amazon in South America and the Zambezi in southern Africa, whereas flooding occurred in the Niger basin in western Africa.

In Asia, the water flow got greater in the basins of the Indus and the Ganges.

Experts assert that such abnormal phenomena are caused by climate change.

It has become commonplace today that a serious water crisis hits one side of the earth, while flood damage expands in the other side due to capricious weather.

Last year, the global mean temperature rose by 1.55 degrees Celsius over the pre-Industrial Revolution period, exceeding the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius, which was set forth by the Paris agreement on climate change ten years ago, for the first time.

Owing to high temperature, water resources have remarkably decreased in some countries as compared to previously, causing serious water shortage to large numbers of people.

An international organization announced that about 3 billion people and many food-producing areas suffered drought damage or water availability was unstable worldwide last year.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and some other countries sustained unprecedentedly great flood damage owing to several days of heavy rain.

This year, too, such extremely abnormal weather has persisted.

In England, during the first week of August, the water storage of reservoirs decreased by 2 percent and five areas were declared drought-prone areas.

The rainfall in Türkiye fell by 27 percent in the period from October last year to August this year over the average year, recording the lowest in some 50 years.

Drought has markedly reduced agricultural output, leading to such negative consequences as food price rise and the suffering of residents from shortage of drinking water.

The reality confirms meteorologists’ forecast that climate change might increase the frequency of global natural disasters.

Warning once again that the enormous danger to be faced by the world in the coming decade will be the calamities caused by abnormal weather, rather than disasters brought by armed conflicts or social division, the experts assert that urgent international action should be taken to prevent global warming.