By Salam Rajesh
As bad as it does sound, the World Meteorological Organization says over these past five years, Asia and Africa together accounted for nearly half of all recorded water-related extreme events, and more than 80% of reported associated deaths – which is bad news altogether.
This finding comes as a hint on delayed global actions on the concerning analysis that the world’s Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) showed persistent decline since 2014-2016, with increasing area under below-normal conditions.
WMO’s latest report, ‘State of Global Water Resources 2025’, released on Thursday, says that the share of global basin area experiencing normal discharge conditions has remained below the historical mean in each of the past seven years (34%-38%, against a 1991-2020 mean of 46%).
The report indicated that between the years 2021 and 2025, below-normal Terrestrial Water Storage repeatedly affected south-western United States, Patagonia and the subtropical Andes, the Ganges-Indus headwaters, northern Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and eastern China, while persistent positive anomalies occurred in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Sahel and the Tibetan Plateau.
Persistent and widespread below- to much-below-normal groundwater levels were observed across Central and Eastern Europe, the central United States, parts of Mexico, northern and central Chile, north-eastern and central-western Brazil, northern South Africa, north-western India and parts of southern Australia, pointing to a cumulative depletion with a multi-year drying trend.
Similarly, between the years 2023 and 2025, glaciers lost mass in each reporting year, with cumulative global glacier mass loss at 1,400 gigaton of water.
The year 2025 marked the fourth consecutive year where all major glaciated regions experienced glacier mass loss. Some small-glacier regions – the European Alps, Scandinavia, the Caucasus – may already have passed their “peak water”, according to WMO.
The WMO report noted that persistent groundwater deficits were observed during the years 2022-2025 in parts of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, India, southern Africa and Australia, with over-abstraction identified as an important driver in several regions.
This of course amplifies to the fact that supplementing to the extended droughts in many regions owing to the current El Nino influence, millions across the world are experiencing water insecurity this summer.
Given the current El Nino scenario, wherein the world has seen devastating climate extremes in various parts of the globe, such as extreme wildfires in Europe, and GLOFs in Asia, the continuity of extreme events is increasingly evident with each passing year.
Asia and Africa were the regions most affected by extreme hydro-meteorological events in 2025, with several African countries experiencing major flooding for two consecutive years (as in Nigeria) or even three consecutive years (as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), according to WMO.
South and South-East Asia were hit by the compounded effects of tropical cyclones and intense monsoon rainfall, leading to more than 3,600 deaths across the affected countries – Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines.
In the United States, catastrophic flash flooding hit the Texas Hill Country in July last year, when the Guadalupe River rose rapidly, with the event causing at least 135 fatalities, most of them in Kerr County.
Economic losses in Jamaica due to hurricane Melissaand associated flooding ranked among the highest recorded in 2025, resulting in a loss equivalent to 41% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country. Cyclone Ditwahcost Sri Lanka around 4% of GDP.
Severe drought gripped Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and Middle East, with Türkiye, Armenia, the Syrian Arab Republic and Jordan each recording their driest conditions in decades.
Drought also returned to the Greater Horn of Africa after one of the driest October-December seasons on record linked to La Niña and a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, prompting a national emergency in Somalia.
The WMO’s State of Global Water Resources 2025 report provides an assessment of global freshwater availability, including river discharge, lakes, groundwater, soil moisture, snow and ice, and combined terrestrial water storage.
It provides a map of key hydrological extreme events throughout the year such as floods and droughts, highlighting regional and national water resource conditions, with a comparative analysis of the current state with long-term hydrological normals, and an evaluation of the impact of climate variability and change on water resources and the hydrological cycle.
WMO’s secretary-general Professor Celeste Saulo sums up the report as: The early months of 2026 saw severe flooding in southern Africa, extreme heat across Australia and South Asia, heat and drought in Europe and landslides and destructive floods in Nepal. At the same time, a strengthening El Niño increases risk of drought in some areas, and further flooding in others. Such conditions demonstrate why hydrological information must support preparedness as well as assessment.
Incidentally, last year (2025) was one of the warmest years on record, at 1.43 degrees Celsius (± 0.13 °C) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline. Significant warm anomalies affected many regions, including Greenland, northern Canada, Western Europe, Fennoscandia, the Mediterranean, and parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and South America.
The key message in the WMO report is all too clear: Knowledge of water resources and hydrological extremes at the local, regional and global scales is fundamental to managing the risks of drought, flooding and cryosphere loss, as well as adapting to a changing climate.
