WMO report finds 2025 among driest years for global river flows
Science & ClimateWell-covered
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The Facts
- The WMO said 2025 was among the driest years for global river flows in more than three decades.
- River flows were below normal across 36% of the world’s river-basin area in 2025.
- Global freshwater storage has continued declining for about a decade, according to the WMO.
- The WMO defines freshwater storage as water in groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil, vegetation, ice and snow.
- Glaciers shrank in every region in 2025, according to the WMO.
- The WMO said El Niño could intensify longer-term water-cycle variability.
- The WMO said water-cycle variability can bring both droughts and floods.
Context
What does freshwater storage include?
The WMO includes groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture, vegetation, glaciers, ice and snow in freshwater storage. Dawn Perfil Estadão
How were the river-flow findings calculated?
The WMO report used simulations from 13 global hydrological models supplied with observed meteorological data. infobae SAPO
Why do declining water reserves matter?
The WMO said long-term water reserves can buffer dry periods; their decline leaves less stored water available during drought years. Kronen Zeitung tportal.hr
Where Left and Right agree, and where they split
- Where Left and Right agree
- A decade-long decline in freshwater storage, worldwide glacier shrinkage in 2025, and below-normal flows across 36% of river basins signal a structural shift, not just one dry year.
- Where Left and Right split
- Climate destabilization demanding emissions cuts and public investment to protect the least-buffered communities, or which basins have the storage capacity to price and manage both drought and flood.
- Why they won’t converge
- The disagreement is a time-horizon divide: whether policy should be driven by a decade-long depletion trend now, or by year-to-year regional storage data as it arrives, even with the same facts in hand.
How left and right read it
Water is the first place a destabilized climate hits people, and it hits the least protected first. That is why a decade of declining freshwater storage matters more than any single dry year: the groundwater, soil, snow and ice that buffer communities are being drawn down, and glaciers shrank in every region in 2025. With below-normal flows across 36% of the world's river basins and variability that brings drought and flood alike, the burden of proof sits on emissions and on public water investment. Resilience must be built before the buffer is gone.
Whether a farm or a household can count on water next year depends on storage and what water actually costs to deliver. Below-normal flows across 36% of the world's river-basin area means the shortfall is uneven and regional, and because variability brings floods as well as droughts, the same dollar must buy capacity for both. El Niño could intensify that swing. So which basins have the storage to ride it out?
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