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.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
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
00:19water catchment areas around the globe, this includes rivers, streams, and lakes,
00:23have deviations from their normal levels. This means those areas had either markedly
00:27too much or too little water. About half of the world has experienced increase of flooding events
00:34and about one-third of the planet has been facing increase of drought events. They say that a big
00:41part of this has to do with humidity, as one degree Celsius of warming adds 7% humidity to the air,
00:47and more humidity 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 speeding
01:03up, and in the report we are showing that, for example, the Swiss mountain glaciers, especially
01:10the alpine ones, they have lost about 10% of their mass last year and this year, which is a record
01:18of the higher amount of loss of that.