UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : WMO Press conference: State of Global Water Resources report

OK, good morning, dear media representatives.

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The World Meteorological Organisation is releasing today the state of the Global Water Resources Report from 2023, so this report is now in its third year.

It is the result of global collaboration and it provides A comprehensive assessment of.

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Global water resources from rivers and groundwater to glaciers and soil moist, moisture and many other variables that are helping us understand better our water situation.

This report gives us a detailed picture of how water is responding to changes in our climate and how these changes are affecting communities, agriculture and the environment.

Today we have with us Celeste Salo, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation, who will give us the context in which this report is released.

Mr Stefan Ulenbrook is the Director of Hydrology, Water and Cryosphere at WMO, and he will be presenting the findings.

And Mrs Sulagna Mishra, she's scientific officer, and she will also be taking your questions at the end.

Professor Salo, what is the context of this report?

Thank you very much, Brigitte.

Good morning to everyone.

Banshu Ratu, thank you for being here today.

Water is the basis of life in this planet, but it can also be a force of destruction.

One of the key findings of this report is that water becomes increasingly unpredictable.

What we call an erratic hydrological cycle leading to sudden floods, severe droughts and climate change is one of the causes of these extreme behaviours.

To mitigate the impact of such potential catastrophes, we must gather reliable data.

After all, we cannot appropriately manage what we do not measure.

WM OS provides solid science based on reliable data to help governments take informed action to protect their populations.

Unfortunately, that science indicates the situation will worsen over the coming years.

WM O's mandate covers not only weather and climate, but also water, including oceans, the cryosphere and sea level rise.

Two weeks ago I was in New York at the United Nations General Assembly when the Pact for the Future was adopted.

This pact places significant emphasis on climate action and related environmental challenges, including water scarcity, floods and sea level rise.

One of the notable initiatives highlighted in it is the Early Warnings for Old system, which aims to ensure that every country is protected by an early warning by 2027.

This initiative is a key element in addressing climate induced disasters such as floods and extreme weather events.

It underscores the urgency of preparing vulnerable communities for impending climate threats like sea level rise and water related crisis.

These global challenges transcend borders and conflicts because water is once again the basis of life on earth.

So we must work together to address the water issues.

This year we have made significant strides in data collection.

However, there are still major gaps, particularly in regions such as Africa, South America and parts of Asia where much of the hydrological cycle remains unknown.

And again, we cannot manage appropriately, but we do not measure.

Water is becoming the most telling indicator of our climax distress and yet as a global society we are not taking both action to protect this resource.

This brings the WMO to release the 20/20/20, sorry, the 2023 State of Global Water Resources Report.

The report helps answer the where, what and how much?

Where are the areas of water stress?

What is happening to glaciers and rivers?

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This knowledge empowers governments, policy makers, and communities to make better decisions.

The report is also a reminder that cooperation through data sharing and building trust between nations is critical for managing our shared water resources.

Let me walk you through some of the key findings of this 2023 report.

1st 2023 was the driest year for global rivers in 33 years.

Second, glaciers around the world lost most water in 50 years in the last 50 years.

Third, the water cycle is becoming more erratic.

You will hear more details in the briefing that is coming, but the question is what can we do with this knowledge?

First, we must fill the gaps in our understanding.

We need to expand our hydrological monitoring, especially in regions where data is scarce.

We cannot afford blind spots when it comes to our water resources.

I urge nations to invest in hydrological monitoring and commit to sharing this critical data because without it, we are navigating without a map.

This data, fed into appropriate early warning systems, can help people to be better prepared and save lives.

Second, we need proactive planning.

Policy makers and community leaders must use this information to protect vulnerable populations, develop resilient infrastructure and ensure equitable access to water.

Access to clean water is a basic human right, and we cannot overlook the needs of marginalised communities.

The signals we are receiving are impossible to ignore.

I am here today not only to share the findings of this report, but to call on all of you to amplify these messages and spark action.

Thank you for your time and your commitment to sharing this story.

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Thank you very much, Mrs Secretary General.

And now I will give the floor to Mr Stefan Ullenberg, Director of Hydrology, Water and Cryosphere at WMO, to give us tell us about the findings.

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Thank you so much pleasure for welcome for my side as well.

And it's a pleasure to to summarise the main findings of the report in the next 10 minutes or so.

What, what is in the report?

As Secretary General Professor Solow just explained, we, we tried to characterise the hydrological or the water situation around the world.

So therefore we we analyse key hydrological components like the water in the river, this river discharge or where water is stored on the landscape.

It's can be stored on this in the surface stores, for instance, in lakes or in, in reservoirs.

Is it better to hear me now?

So water can be stored in the surface and lakes and reservoirs, or it can be stored in in the subsurface, in the soil moisture or the groundwater, or as snow and ice in in the upper parts of the mountains, as glaciers or in the snow cover.

And we analyse all these parameters from around the world and, and synthesise that data into one report.

Often you will hear us saying, oh, this is above normal, this is below normal.

And we characterise that as such.

We, we have for every parameter here in this example for stream flow, which is changing not only every day doing floods, it can change every every minute or every hour.

So we characterise that.

And statistically, if it remains in the beige part of this figure, we call it, it's normal.

It's, it's between the 25 and 75% percentile.

If it's much above, we colour code it bluish or greenish or if it's much below, it's more yellow or orange.

And the drier the more orange and the, the wetter the more blue.

So, so when we say above normal or below normal, that's a statistical expression 1st result as Professor Saul already said, if you look at the last 33 years of discharge data.

So that's the the flow in the rivers and we characterise that for the whole world.

Now you have here 3433 years, every year is 1 column.

And then how much of the earth is in the middle?

So it's kind of average or is it above or below normal?

You can see that for the 33 years, it's going up and down.

What interesting is that particular over the last five years, we observe that the the area globally that is behaving normal.

You know where the water is, is in in the normal part is lower than in the previous year.

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What is also interesting is that the year 2023 was the year which was, which was almost half of the earth was above, excuse me, below normal conditions.

We never had that before.

So it's really interesting that the very hot weather, as Professor Salo said, 2023 was another year, was a temperature record, was the warmest year ever, ever recorded.

That translated into dry rivers.

So, so the largest part of the area was actually much below normal.

So, so we had really exceptionally dry conditions.

If you look at this at the global scale and it's not about the details, but if you just look at it, you see a lot of orange and yellow colours here.

And that indicates where the river flow was below or much below normal.

And if I may guide you just through a few hotspots, what we observed for the year 2023, maybe start with Professor Solos Home, if I may say so, we have the Platter Basin where near Buenos Aires, southern part of northern part of Argentina, southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay.

In that area, we had a very persistent drought over a number of years, which had huge implications for the ecology, but also for the economy.

Really GDP was going down because of the dry conditions.

The change in in 2023, I need to say we had the first half of the year characterised by so-called land linear conditions and roughly in July the system swapped into a land, a Nino system.

During the land linear that area which I just mentioned here in South America was was characterised by dry conditions that the second-half of the year became wetter is is seen a visit.

It's it's not the extreme dry anymore, but it didn't turn into a wet area.

However, the drought moved upwards so that most of Latin America where they're very dry.

That actually continued in 2024 and we now experience very low record low reservoir levels in many parts of Latin America with implications on power cuts because of hydropower etcetera.

Another example, if I may guide you to the southwest of of the United States, you see there's a bluish colour that's the Colorado River and sub basins.

There was for almost 10 years a dry situation.

But in 2023 also because of a record snowfall, we should we see, we look at some figures in a minute that really resulted in much, much wetter conditions in that S southwestern part of the United States.

So the drought was over for this year and people are very curious to see how it will develop.

That part is also economically very, very important for for the United States and the world.

And the economy was also suffering because of dry conditions.

Other examples without maybe too much detail, the the Greater Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia, after five years of of severe drought with huge food insecurity challenges for the people in that part turned into wetter conditions in 2023.

While in Australia, which suffered a lot from the La Nina situation doing a severe drought, now turned into somewhat better or average conditions during the year.

But having, excuse me, what we humans do to to average out these these **** and low flow conditions.

We build reservoirs and we store water in the landscape to make it available.

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Humans and the economy.

And you see here the inflow into reservoirs.

Again, the more orange you see, the drier the conditions.

The the size of the circle indicates how big the reservoir is and just at a global scale, the pattern that we see in the stream flow is now translated into the inflow of reservoirs.

And again, many dry conditions with serious consequences for economy.

These were average over the year.

Having many parts of the world under dry condition doesn't mean there were no floods.

As Professor Sala said, the water cycle is becoming more erratic.

So that means we have where we have more dry conditions on average.

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So here you see a couple of blue dots around the world, just a few selected major floods to to pinpoint all of them would be impossible.

You wouldn't see anything anymore because we there's hardly a week where we do do not have flooding anywhere, somewhere in the world.

So what we see here, serious flooding, particularly in eastern Africa, also Libya was it was a very disastrous flooding happening in September last year.

Normally it should never rain in September at all in Libya.

But then there was an enormous amount of rainfall in the southern Mediterranean because of **** ocean temperature, which collapse, which caused the collapse of two dams in Libya and dramatic consequences for more than 10,000 people probably died because of this disaster.

Interesting is that in in Greece or parts of Italy, but also enormous amount of rainfall was falling.

It didn't lead to such a disaster because early with early warning systems were in place and people could manage the risks of flooding better.

So therefore we see that a better preparedness of society and the early warning really translate in in less, less disasters.

Let me move on to the this was where the water is flowing in the rivers.

Now we look where the water is stored.

I come to the shorter second-half of my presentation and what we see on this graph is the is all these dots are groundwater levels.

And as it was said before, we have an enormous increase of data availability.

So thanks to the hydrometeorological services around the world, they make more and more data available.

This year we could use almost 36,000 of groundwater levels.

Analyse it in this report and here you see a few countries, just a few examples, how the situation is in many parts similar as in the stream flow.

We see here also dry groundwater wells compared to again the year 2023, compared with the previous 20 years of data.

And so that that pattern is also translated and economies that increasingly depend on groundwater, if they have these dry conditions are more vulnerable could change.

What is also the total storage of water is in the is so-called the terrestrial water storage.

So that means water stored in the groundwater system, in the soil, water in rivers and lakes and reservoirs everywhere.

And this is all summarised measured with the satellite.

And then we see storage changes over time.

We compared the year 2023 with the previous 19 years of data.

And you see here that many parts of Europe, the Mediterranean area, for instance, parts of North America, South America, really less water is stored.

So we, we use more water on ground where we pump more out more groundwater than we actually use or for water stored as snow and ice, more water is melted away and flowing into the ocean than it was naturally recharged by snow.

We see there's also in dry conditions.

This is global maps for different months of soil moisture.

We, we understand that it's not about the details, but but I think visually you already see that it's, there's a lot of orange and and yellow colours there.

So we see that the the hot climate of 2023 resulted in drier soil moisture conditions.

Again, was was severe consequences in many parts of the world for agriculture, for food security or ecosystems, etcetera.

Last part of my short presentation is on the water is stored as snow and ice being here in Switzerland.

That's a that's a super important part for us.

What you see here is from the Northern hemisphere that are provided by by the survey in in Canada that they analyse the Northern hemisphere and you see here red shows in March, we had relatively low snow and ice as as snow conditions.

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Snow water equivalent is parameter for snow.

For instance, Switzerland, maybe you can see this on the map, it's dark orange.

So 2023 was very low in snow in because of a dry, relatively warm winter and that resulted in relatively snow cover there.

Interesting.

Earlier I said that the Colorado and southwest of the United States had a, the, the drought was over.

And I mentioned this is also caused by more rainfall, but also by more snowfall.

They had record **** snow, snowfall in the, in the Rocky Mountains, for instance.

And you see this in the southwest of in the western part of the United States where we had really exceptionally **** snow cover in this year, which which then resulted in more resources in the in the following summer.

As soon as the snow is melted, large part is on glaciers, though when the snow is transformed into ice, glaciers are formed here very visible in Switzerland.

And, and that's a sad story.

I think we have explained this at this very in this very room for a number of times.

The glaciers are retreating rapidly.

We, thanks to the fantastic work of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, now we have almost 50 years of data, so data since the mid 70s.

And it shows here for the summer half year and the winter half year summarise for the whole globe the the situation of glaciers.

So the mass of a glacier globally summarised in a column here.

And you see a particular in the last decades it's it's very rare.

It's very unfortunate to glacier have been retweeting rapidly.

And also the latest data for this year actually shows that at at least in the Swiss Alps, it has been continuing and more glaciers are having reduced them.

The mass balance also here in Switzerland particularly, what does it mean if a glacier is is melting more and more?

That means more water becomes available downstream for some years.

If a lot of water is stored up in the mountains and a glacier, and then it becomes warmer and the water is mobilised, it's melted and flowing downstream, then more water becomes available.

That's what we see at the moment.

So the river flows downstream of glaciers.

Is that relatively **** at the moment?

However, if the glacier is gone, in a few more decades it will be.

Very dramatic because then the the summer **** flows from the melting glaciers will disappear because there's no storage anymore.

So if the glacier disappears, that change is completely the hydrological regime.

It changes completely the conditions for ecosystems.

It changes completely the the availability of water for farmers etcetera.

So it has really severe consequences.

We call this for a couple of years higher water availability also so-called peak water that it means through the melting glaciers more water becomes available for some, for some years and and then it becomes significantly less.

These were a few of the main results.

There's much more in this thick report and we are happy to answer more questions doing the Q&A.

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Thank you very much, Stefan.

And now I'm happy to open the floor to questions to our Secretary General, Stefan Ulenbroek and Sulagna also Misha is also available.

Yes, Christian, thank you.

It's Christiana with the German Press Agency.

I have two questions on the data.

The Secretary General mentioned 33 years for 33 years.

Is that because that's the amount of data you have or does that mean 33 years ago it was drier than today?

That's the first question.

And the second one is, I understand that a lot of data is missing.

And Stefan explained to me just now that there are models that that fill in the gaps.

How reliable are these models?

How can you model river flow in Africa where you have very little data, you know, not even from the vicinity?

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Maybe we take this question together.

We take 30 years as a climate normal period, 30 years and we compare the year with the last 30 years to say, you know, how, how was it different from the last 30 years?

So 30 years of data we had, it's now the third report.

So we have now 33 years of data, which we always compare with the same 30 years.

So the 30 years is the baseline and then we compare the year.

How was 2021 doing compared to the 30 years 2022 and now 2023.

There's much longer data available and also previous data, but just we, we it's just in climatology often a standard period of 30 years which you take as as an average if you take other 30 years maybe before the pre industrial time, if you would have data that might, might lead to even different results or more dramatic results, but but we don't know that.

And sorry, can I just make it more understandable?

It doesn't mean that 33 years ago it was drier, because that's what I understand when you say it's the driest for 33 years.

I understand that 33 years ago it was drier than today, but that's wrong.

In the 33 years of data, we had never such a large area around the world which was under such dry conditions.

So from the 33 years of data that were considered in this report, it was the driest year.

It could be that in in first half of the last century that it was a dry could well be, but we don't know that because we don't have the data and very important to help.

Thank you for your question.

Help us to clarify.

We do have these global operational hydrological models.

We take the 10 best models from Germany, the US, Canada, Japan, China, etcetera, etcetera.

And these are averaged and these models are are calibrated on, on much more data.

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We have only what is it 33 years of 34 countries which made the data available.

But in the 30 years before, there's many, many, there's many, many more data sets available, including in Africa, much less in Africa than in Europe, but there's more data to calibrate and validate these models just to analyse the last year we had only the data available from the countries as it is per press release.

So thank you for clarifying this.

So we, we think our models are, are reasonably accurate and, and we feel confident for making the statements we make.

Yeah, every, every model has uncertainty.

We could expand on that.

But in general, I think the, the, the bold statements, we, we feel comfortable in making them.

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Just to add to what Stephen said, how reliable the model results are, one, as Stephen said for the previous years, these are calibrated for much more data than what we see in the report for 2023.

But apart from that, we also do two other kind of validation.

For example, we do for whatever data that is available, we check the model results, not just the calibration part, but we also check the model results with the results from the NC 2 data.

And in this result in this what we have seen that more than 75% accuracy with in C2 observe data versus model data.

And wherever data is not available, we do model inter comparison.

So if we have 10 models, how many of them actually agree in each basin?

This is especially important for areas where we do not have data.

This is also a general practise.

When we look at forecasting, when we don't have forecasting real data, what we of course what we do is we have the models and how we are sure about or how can we be more confident about the models is how many of the models are actually agreeing to each other because they are all calibrated in a different format and so on.

And in this report, we see that more than 95% of the in more than 95% of the areas the models have agreed.

So we are quite confident about the results that we show.

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Thank you for taking my question.

I'm yes Pero from Agence France Press.

I have a, just a clarification and and a question, a clarification on the Ward reservoir that you used on the photos you when you talk about reservoir, you are showing dams.

I was wondering if you only look at the reserve dams or if you also look at other kind of reservoir.

And then the question would be on the, the, the climate change and the cycle of water, which you explain it was now more irregular, more erratic.

You talk about the importance of early warnings about mitigation and I was wondering, is there, is there a way to make this cycle of water more regular again?

I know scientifically speaking, I don't know.

Is there a way of coming back?

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I'll take the first part of the question about dams and reservoirs.

So we have divided the chapters into two.

We have 1 chapter on lakes where we look at naturally, naturally naturally stored water and the one the chapter that we are showing here on reservoirs.

These are the largest reservoirs where we could collect data from.

Not necessarily only man made concrete ones, but also the ones where.

So it's basically the ones we could get data from.

It's a combination of both, but the lakes, if you, if you wanted to know about leaks, that's a different chapter.

Thank you very much for your question.

I, I will take part of your second question, but I'm sure that Stefan can also add on that.

Certainly we cannot put things back to normal.

What we can do is to stop the, the acceleration that we find in, in what we in what we see as their responses, the climate to our action.

And, and you know, we are trying to, to consistently speak about the hydrological cycle because it is a cycle.

We used to think sometimes in rivers and then we speak about grain as, as if they were separated parts of, of, of, of a system and they are part of a system.

And what we see is that we come from, from, I could say old times where we could manage a dam, we could manage a river, which is you, a well known system.

But now you have much more water in, in, in, in, I would say like a vapour and, and, and in into what we call atmospheric rivers.

Atmospheric rivers, you cannot put them into dams, you cannot manage them.

So here we are with the system much more erratic, different, difficult to predict.

And this is the current reality.

That's why we speak about the hydrological cycle and we need to think about water, groundwater, rivers, lakes, glaciers and atmospheric vapour.

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We just one two sentences if I may.

What what we see through climate change, the hydrological cycle is accelerating.

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So we see more floods and droughts more pronounced most more longer dry periods, but at the same time more flooding in many parts of the world.

So it's accelerating, it's becoming more erratic to control that atmospheric delivers, etcetera.

We cannot control even rivers.

We kind of not control.

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Think about Livia, the example where where due to, you know, challenges of huge amounts of rainfall and poor maintenance of the of the dam.

And so more than 10,000 people died were literally washed away into the Mediterranean Sea.

And so, so it's very difficult to control.

The only thing what we can do is to, to stabilise the climate, which is a generation challenge.

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I think you answered my question, but just to be clear, I was hoping for a bit more clarification on how it was that there were record glacier losses but also sort of record low flows.

But I think it's because of different parts of the world.

But if you could just explain that a bit more clearly and maybe comment on how governments can plan for this really long term.

Governments are planning multi billion dollar projects around the world based on dams, nuclear plants which depend on river flows.

How can they plan and are they getting it right or are they more basing it on what's happened in the past rather than than what's going to happen in the future?

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The directly downstream of glaciers, you can have for some years the so-called peak water effect, you know that you have more melt.

I think we, we, we try to expand that.

In some areas of Asia, it's predicted that we already exceeded the peak water.

So, so it's already at the declining side.

So in other parts of the world it's before.

So it's, it's difficult to say everywhere it's behaving like this.

But if you look at the own catchment, which you might permeate, there's the upper part is glacial rise now, But if you look at the whole Rd all the way down to southern France is of course, large parts of the of the basin are not influenced by the glaciers directly down some of the glaciers, yes, but but the big water use for irrigation in in southern France, for instance, is, is of course, you know, depending also on the on the rainfall and and many other many other storages.

So it depends therefore with the to, to summarises in one figure all these complexities is a bit difficult.

But I think downstream of glaciers is very important part.

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I, I, I think we stabilising the climate as as Professor Soligist said, is, is a big challenge and we cannot, we need to adapt to that.

We need to adapt to a change of the hydrology.

We need to adapt to sometimes more frequent and different at different times of the year, flooding and droughts, which which really impacts ecosystem, which impacts species and which impacts agricultural water use and industries etcetera.

We, it's clear that we need to to move to more renewables.

But this change of the water availability in Latin America, some countries have more than 50% of the of the energy comes from hydropower in Latin America.

But this change of the water cycle really challenges the countries.

At the moment in Quito, you have regular power cuts, the capital of Ecuador because there's just no water in the reservoirs.

And, and that has huge implication for the people and convenience, but also for the economy.

And, and we have this in many, many examples.

This was just something which I picked up last weekend in, in, in the, in the news.

And so we see this globally.

So are we on the right track and what kind of investments are needed if we wanted, we need to adapt to these changes.

One investment is more needed in infrastructure in in early warning systems and and maybe locally protecting from floods and droughts.

Maybe reservoirs can be can be locally the right solution, but also maybe different water use, the way we utilise our water resources.

We need to rethink that.

So that needs investments in infrastructure but also in the way we use our our increasingly scarce resources.

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Just to add another point on water management, on better management.

When we have data like this, the the kind of analysis that we do to see what is the impact of climate change on the different components of the water cycle.

It's not necessarily similar the for one area in in for some examples, for example, when in Amazon we see we saw record low and driven discharge, but we at the same time we saw a bit of increase in overall water storage, the reservoirs.

Similarly in parts of South Africa and parts of India, we saw increase in groundwater storage, whereas there was dry periods in stream flow.

So how the different parts of the water cycle is behaving to the climate change is different.

So when we have information on these components, we could manage or we could decide on which parts the dependency on this year or on this season can be improvised.

But for this, for taking this kind of decisions better, we need the information and hence coming back again to better monitoring and better analysis of the data to be able to manage and adapt better to this changing climate.

We have another question in the room, please.

Yes, hello, Daniel Johnson, you're on TV and radio.

It was a clarification really.

It was really a follow up to your comments about the glaciers in Switzerland and beyond.

I mean, are you sounding the death knell for the ski industry in Europe?

Because it sounds like it's all happening in the Rockies.

And also another clarification over the water resources for farmers in Europe as well.

You know, if the glaciers disappear, and I think you said decades, could you be a bit more precise about how many decades we're looking at just so that people can to get a grasp on maybe the urgency of the issue?

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Thank you for your question.

The melting of glaciers, So the response, the retreating of glaciers is a process over many years, sometimes decades, but we see it already now.

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If you look at the Swiss glaciers, as you said, 2000, twenty 22 and 23, roughly 10% of the mass of the Swiss glaciers disappeared in two years, 10% in two years.

Now last year, the latest data which was published end of September was that last year it was also another two, 2 1/2% roughly that's the data indicates disappeared over the last summer, which wasn't as as warm and as dry and the winter was not as dry.

So to recharge the glaciers, but another half, 2 1/2 percent disappeared.

So it really it's, it's changing rapidly and it's changing now.

So it's not a question now we have a couple of decades to, to, to adapt to this change of the hydrology and the impact the skis this the ski industry, as you said, Well, there's, there's skiing on glaciers as well, but mainly it's on snow.

So is it really depends on the snow during the year and how much the of the mountains are covered by snow in a warming climate.

Needless to say that the, the, the elevation where we still have snow is, is going moving upwards.

It's a warmer climate, that's clear.

So therefore, the likelihood of having less favourable conditions for skiing is, is there, but we don't call for the death of the ski industry or something like this.

But we do, we do recognise the problem.

We do see rapid changes and, but it, it varies a lot.

Maybe you remember the figure we showed from the, the March snow condition.

And then in the, in the Southwest, in the Rockies, there was enormous amount of snowfall in this year.

Many other parts of that of that figure indicated a lot of orange and red.

So there's a huge spatial and temporal variability in that data.

So it's it's, it's difficult to say.

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If I may also, I could like to emphasise that WMO is working with FIS, which is the Federal International Ski Association in order to understand the impacts of the the change in snows and snow patterns into this activity.

Because we, we all understand and this is another part of our report that all these changes, all these changes that we'd see and we are documenting through our different reports impact different activities, impact all of us in terms of global community.

We are people, we we live here and there, but they also impact important industries that help economies develop.

So that's why we are as WMO trying to work with these sectors in order to understand and work together to assess the particular impact and then to provide adaptation measures that are adequate for that particular sector.

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And and regarding the International Federation of Ski, you can find our press release released last Thursday, which is covering this topic as well.

And we have two people waiting on line.

Thank you for your patience.

[Other language spoken]

I don't know if you've got any visibility, but that we just came off the hottest summer on record.

And I'm just wondering if you could say what kind of trends you're seeing for possible the rivers and possible water scarcity this year as well?

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We we haven't analysed the data for 2024 yet.

In terms of hydrology, this data becomes only available later.

Unfortunately, the temperature records are breathtaking.

Yet another month was a was a record global temperature.

I think Professor Solow has made this very clear in, in, in several occasions.

And the so the heat from 2023 continued certainly in the first half of last year, but also in August and probably September was maybe there was one month, there was yet one more month, another month.

But overall temperature, we, we, it remains very ****.

Very likely we haven't analysed the hydrology, but very likely this hot dry weather continues to, to translate to low river flow.

That's that's, that's the that's what.

[Other language spoken]

But in many parts of the world we we expect more water scarcity.

And if I may, one more sentence on the adaptation sentence, there was the previous question.

Globally, 70% of all water withdraws, all the water we take out of the system is used for agriculture, 70%.

In some countries it's more than 90%.

In countries like Central Asia where there's a lot of inefficient irrigation practises, more than 90% of all water that is used is used for irrigation.

So really we need to adapt to more effective, more efficient systems in these areas to, to save more water resources.

Also in agriculture that's very important.

But if you are in a peak water situation, the the Central Asian glaciers are, are melting rapidly at the moment they have a lot of water, but very likely in the future this might become even more serious.

So at the moment where they have actually a lot of water, that's the time where they would need to adapt to to having much less in the future.

But if if the water is still there, it's it's very difficult to motivate investments in in more water savings.

But but this is actually needed.

It's needed in Central Asia and it's needed in many parts of the world.

[Other language spoken]

And we have a question from Lisa Schlein, please.

Yes, good morning and thank you for taking my question.

I have AI have a couple actually, I it was interested you were talking about the disaster of the dam breaking in Libya and the fact that Greece didn't suffer a similar situation because of early warning.

Could you elaborate upon that?

How is it that early warning can somehow mitigate a, a, a possible disasters such as happened in Libya and in Greece?

And yeah, if you would elaborate upon the early warning systems and how this can help.

Also, you were talking about the impact, the consequences for the economy.

What about the consequences of water wars?

They're already occurring.

And then we have a very explosive situation occurring right now in the Middle East and this this is an area which is rather dry and has already you know they have been lots of tensions in that regard, if you could speak a bit about that.

And then lastly, are there some areas in the world?

Where?

Which are more susceptible to water scarcity than others and less like less capable of somehow adapting to the new situation and mitigating the future scare.

Well, current and future scarcity of water.

I'm thinking particularly of Africa, which has lots of conflicts and is very poor etcetera.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much for your question.

I will take the first part of your question and our colleagues will will complete with more detailed information.

Let me share with you that with all of you that early warnings are a key measure for adaptation and why do we say so?

You ask us to elaborate because first early warnings are based on forecasts and of course data.

So we need to to prepare in advance.

They the question is how much in advance can we prepare and there are different strategies to prepare.

So we can speak about a flash flood guidance system, for example, which is very short time scale because it's it's sudden kind of event when you have a, a river that has a very deep slope and suddenly you get a, a flood from that kind of situation.

You need some kind of early, early warning system that is completely different from an early warning that try to to cover much longer time scales.

For example, the Hydro SOS approach that a we have a will be working in WMO which is more like at seasonal scales where you are understanding what is happening with the river.

The kind of pictures we have seen during this presentation where we can see that a basing is suffering from less rains in the upper part of the basing.

And so you expect the lower part of the basin to be affected by by less water, for example.

And that is where you can provide also an early warning and, and do your best to prepare in advance in this case, not to be affected by a floor or perhaps to be resilient and, and, and gather water for, for, for human and for consumption.

And I, I think that Stefan did a great example on the use or I would say that the ***** of water in terms of irrigation.

And, and there is it comes to, to decision making with time scales or time horizons around 12345 years or more.

So there again, is it, we can call it an early warning.

What we want to say is we need to be prepare in advance.

That is the meaning of an early warning.

And certainly yes, if you are prepared, you make better decisions.

Of course, as we could see, unfortunately during the last hurricane Len in in in the States, we could see that the that the forecast was was there.

The early warning was given.

The Med service is really well prepared and, and, and put all the information in place, but the still the decision is hard to take.

Communication was there, yes, but decision making was difficult for people that were not used to to be affected by this kind of phenomena.

So it comes to us the, the, the, the request of taking into consideration behavioural sciences into the early warnings system because you may have a perfect forecast, but if you don't, you don't have the way to have to really modify the behaviour so that your people get prepared in, in the best way possible.

[Other language spoken]

So it is a huge, I would say, challenge, a societal challenge.

We are we are working together and we believe that there are very important opportunities to improve.

Each life counts and we must work not to lose lives as as our first priority.

But thank you what I may add to Miss Lyons, several questions you you asked for the situation in, in Greece and Southern Mediterranean.

First, it was in September that normally if you have any rainfall in Northern Africa, it's in the it's, it's frontal rainfall in the in the winter season and not, not not at the end of the summer.

So it was really exceptional.

Why did that happen?

It was an extremely warm Mediterranean Sea.

It was a record **** sea temperature in the Mediterranean Sea.

And that caused rainfall generation mechanism like in a tropical cyclone, something which you observe in the tropics, not in the Mediterranean Sea.

And therefore these enormous amounts of rain were, were falling over Greece, southern parts of Italy and Libya in Greece, where also we had five, 600 millimetres of rainfall during this event, which is almost, it's kind of, you need more of several months almost it's almost a yearly rainfall falling in, in, in three days.

So less than three days in.

In Greece it happened much less because of early warning systems, because of good maintenance of infrastructure.

One of the problems in Libya was not only the enormous amount of rainfall, it was the collapse of these two dams, which likely was caused by by insufficient maintenance of of these dams.

And that is then kind of the Achilles pace of our society.

If we don't take good care of our infrastructure, that can be that can be very serious, particularly doing extreme events.

You were asking how, how, how do we reduce victims or to, to avoid from a national hazard that it becomes to a disaster.

In Italy, 12,000 people were evacuated because of early warning system.

These 12,000 people were not exposed to the direct effects anymore.

So therefore you, you reduce the damage through early warning and through early action.

So that that combination, as Professor Saudi said, is important on water wars.

There's colleagues in San Francisco at the and, and Stanford, there's an institute there in Berkeley, excuse me, they, they analyse water wars and the, they show very clear tendency of increasing tension around border resources.

There's more violent and they they have different different categories for that more violent.

How do I say that polite me exchanges or problems because of water scarcity because of water insecurity.

It could be that the media is is is is more sensitive to it.

There'd be more more is more is reported on that.

So to have a over many decades reliable database is very difficult.

But all their statistics show show an upward trend.

I think, I think we can safely say that.

And you ask where, where, where are the regions that are mostly exposed to, to water insecurity, to increasing water scarcity can also mean floods.

So it's not only the, the, it's both extremes that hurt society.

And I think all our data show it's particular where the capacity is low to deal with these challenges.

Like in many parts of Africa and Middle East, Jordan is one of the most water, water scarce countries because of the **** population density and the very arid conditions you have in Jordan and but also Central Asia, many parts of Asia, Latin America very vulnerable to, to the changes of what we see in climate change.

As we mentioned during our presentation, it's, it's difficult to say it's one region, but but we see the increasing variability of the of the hydrological cycle causing tension and stress and and can provide the the source of conflict in many parts of the world.

[Other language spoken]

Just to add very quickly to to the early warning, the numbers that Stefan mentioned before, this is very, very important.

The early warning it just to emphasise that not this doesn't mean that the disaster will not happen, but it will not convert into into national emergency situation in terms of fatalities and so on.

As Stefan said, around 12,000 people were evacuated within one within one day with a 24 hour notice, 12,000 people from the Renault River basin were evacuated.

But if you look at the entire area which was subjected to this **** rainfall in the first half of May, the Emilia, Romania area of Italy, where this flooding was happening, they started getting 8 times more than the average rainfall in the area.

And they started, they gave out this, this notice for evacuation.

And in the overall area, 23,000 people were evacuated just to be safe.

And there were still landslides that happened.

Of course, 1000 more than 1000 landslides happened.

There were 15 casualties.

But overall, this how they how the how the country reacted because of the early warning that was in place was remarkable.

And this is what we want in other parts of the world as well.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much.

We have one last question from Maya Plants.

Yes, thank you, Brigitte for taking my question.

My question is, could you talk about the Amazon rainforest hydrological system and what's happening in there?

And does the second question is farming leading to COP 29?

Will we see more addressed in terms of vertical farming and other methods of agriculture that preserve water systems?

So whoever wants to take it up for the Amazons?

Yes, in the Amazons we continue to see record low rainfall.

Hence also we we see that in the situation for the droughts, we have at the moment reaching the drought levels that was never seen before.

Since 1960s, we have reached a level that the level in the rivers, especially the Madeira River that the the boats with that takes the supplies are not able to reach the dock cities.

This is also resulting in **** prices, inflation, affecting food security, etcetera.

This is also the the **** temperatures here and the and the and and this dryness is also affecting the Amazonas forest.

So the Amazon is continuing to burn and the smoke that we see that is going up is also affecting the temperature in the area in general.

The warmer waters in the north tropical Atlantic, which is also making it difficult to form rain clouds over the area, which is then as a result also affecting the southern parts of Amazon.

So this is an overall situation that's happening now in this is the results of these are the results that we see.

These are the impacts that we've seen August, September.

But to put them into numbers, we will have to wait until we see the until the data comes in next year and we analyse the after impacts and how this is reacting with the other parts of the water cycle.

[Other language spoken]

If I May 11 addition on your question of do we see more, more solutions like like vertical farming, we we need to reconsider how we produce our food from in a changing climate.

That's that's for sure.

Vertical farming can be very resource efficient and particularly for producing fruits, vegetable and, you know, ****, **** end commodities also very good from a nutritious point of view.

However, it will be not be the solution for staple fruits.

So we will not do Mace and and wheat and and others in in vertical forms.

So that that's that's from a infrastructure and resource point of view, not possible, but but it is certainly a solution that also can help to increase to do to provide food and nutrition security.

These solutions will be promoted and but it needs initial investment.

So it's maybe not not the solution for all the countries in the world.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much.

I don't see any hands up.

So this press conference will come to an end.

Thank you very much to everyone and wishing you a very good week.

[Other language spoken]

WMO Press conference: State of Global Water Resources report - 07 October 2024