The year 2023 quickly became an environmental record-breaker in all the worst ways, and now, a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has added yet another one to the list – 2023 was also the driest year for global rivers in 33 years.
The WMO report, State of Global Water Resources 2023, found that rivers across the globe were “characterized by mostly drier-than-normal to normal conditions” last year, comparing it to data on the volume of water flowing through a river at any given time going back to 1991.
While there was no data for 7 percent of the world’s rivers, 45 percent of them were found to have either below or much below normal levels of discharge. This was seen perhaps most sharply in the Amazon River basin, which the report found experienced record-low water levels last year (although that record now appears to have been broken). The drought had a marked effect on both humans and animals, with over 120 of the river’s dolphins found dead.
Not everywhere was so dry, however, with 17 percent of world river discharge in 2023 being above or much above normal levels. Multiple countries in eastern Africa, for example, experienced devastating floods that caused death and displacement. The heavy rainfall that led to the flooding, the report states, was “likely triggered by El Niño conditions”.
However, human-induced climate change is also suggested to be playing a role in some of the extremes seen.
“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo in a statement. “It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water.”
“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change” Saulo continued. “We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies. Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action.”
The urgent action that’s being called for is a better understanding of what’s going on with the world’s freshwater. While the WMO report is considered to be comprehensive, there’s still plenty of data missing due to a lack of observations or sharing, with Africa, South America, and Asia underrepresented.
“This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments,” said Saulo. “[F]ar too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure.”
