The UN’s World Meteorological Organization has just made an announcement about the global water cycle situation on our planet and it isn’t good. According to the “State of Global Water Resources Report,” which provides the scientific conclusion from the previous year, our planet’s water cycle is severely out of whack. Veuer’s Tony Spitz has the details.
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00:00The UN's World Meteorological Organization has just made an announcement about the global water
00:04cycle situation, and it isn't good. According to the State of Global Water Resources report,
00:09which provides the scientific conclusions from the previous year, in this case 2022,
00:14our planet's water cycle is severely out of whack. The report indicates that 50% of all water
00:19catchment areas around the globe, this includes rivers, streams, and lakes, have deviations from
00:24their normal levels. This means those areas had either markedly too much or too little water.
00:29About half of the world has experienced increase of flooding events and about one third of the
00:36planet has been facing increase of drought events. They say that a big part of this has to do with
00:42humidity, as one degree Celsius of warming adds seven percent humidity to the air. And more
00:47humidity means there's a higher potential for flooding events. But in areas that currently
00:51rely on glacial melt to feed their rivers and provide life-sustaining water to entire regions,
00:56they could soon face water scarcity issues. We also know that the melting of glaciers is
01:03speeding up, and in the report we are showing that, for example, the Swiss
01:08mountain glaciers, especially the alpine ones, they have lost about 10% of their mass
01:16last year and this year, which is a record high amount of loss of that.