World’s water cycle getting unpredictable, says UN study

Increasingly intense floods and droughts are a “distress signal” of what is to come as climate change makes the planet’s water cycle ever more unpredictable, the United Nations said on Monday (October 7, 2024).

Last year, the world’s rivers were their driest for more than 30 years, glaciers suffered their largest loss of mass in half a century, and there were also a “significant” number of floods, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in a report.

“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement accompanying the State of Global Water Resources Report.

“We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies,” she said.

Published - October 08, 2024 09:36 am IST