More than half of the world’s lakes have shrunk in past 30 years, study finds, Lakes and reservoirs have lost 22 gigatonnes a year since 1992, driven by factors including global heating and human consumption. Guardian Reuters Fri 19 May 2023 More than half of the world’s large lakes and reservoirs have shrunk since the early 1990s – chiefly because of the climate crisis and human consumption – intensifying concerns about water supply for agriculture, hydropower and human consumption, a study has found.A team of international researchers reported that some of the world’s most important freshwater sources – from the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia, to South America’s Lake Titicaca – lost water at a cumulative rate of about 22 gigatonnes a year for nearly three decades, equivalent to the total water use in the US for the entire year of 2015. Fangfang Yao, a surface hydrologist at the University of Virginia who led the study published on Thursday in the journal Science, said 56% of the decline in natural lakes was driven by global heating and human consumption, with warming “the larger share of that”. Climate scientists generally think that the world’s arid areas will become drier under climate change, and wet areas will get wetter, but the study found significant water loss even in humid regions.......read on                https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/19/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-lakes-have-shrunk-in-past-30-years-study-finds                

AND.......How bottled water companies are draining our drinking water.As droughts become more prevalent, corporate control over our drinking water is threatening the health of water sources and the access people have to them. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how foreign multinational companies are extracting billions of litres of water from natural aquifers to sell back to the same communities from which it came – for huge profits.....Watch the Video           https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2025/mar/20/how-bottled-water-companies-are-draining-our-drinking-water-video

Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world’s water systems are being put under “unprecedented stress”, the report found. The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade – in food, clothing and consumer goods – to meet their needs.  Some countries benefit more than others from “green water”, which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to “blue water” from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in “atmospheric rivers” which transport moisture from one region to another. About half the world’s rainfall over land comes from healthy vegetation in ecosystems that transpires water back into the atmosphere and generates clouds that then move downwind. China and Russia are the main beneficiaries of these “atmospheric river” systems, while India and Brazil are the major exporters, as their landmass supports the flow of green water to other regions. Between 40% and 60% of the source of freshwater rainfall is generated from neighbouring land use. “The Chinese economy depends on sustainable forest management in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic region,” said Prof Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the co-chairs of the commission. “You can make the same case for Brazil supplying fresh water to Argentina. This interconnectedness just shows that we have to place fresh water in the global economy as a global common good.”     

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the president of Singapore and a co-chair of the commission, said countries must start cooperating on the management of water resources before it is too late. “We have to think radically about how we are going to preserve the sources of fresh water, how we are going to use it far more efficiently, and how we are going to be able to have access to fresh water available to every community, including the vulnerable – in other words, how we preserve equity [between rich and poor],” Shanmugaratnam said.      The Global Commission on the Economics of Water was set up by the Netherlands in 2022, drawing on the work of dozens of leading scientists and economists, to form a comprehensive view of the state of global hydrological systems and how they are managed. Its 194-page report is the biggest global study to examine all aspects of the water crisis and suggest remedies for policymakers. The findings were surprisingly stark, said Rockström. “Water is victim number one of the [climate crisis], the environmental changes we see now aggregating at the global level, putting the entire stability of earth’s systems at risk,” he told the Guardian. “[The climate crisis] manifests itself first and foremost in droughts and floods. When you think of heatwaves and fires, the really hard impacts are via moisture – in the case of fires, [global heating] first dries out landscapes so that they burn.”   Every 1C increase in global temperatures adds another 7% of moisture to the atmosphere, which has the effect of “powering up” the hydrological cycle far more than would happen under normal variations. The destruction of nature is also further fuelling the crisis, because cutting down forests and draining wetlands disrupts the hydrological cycle that depends on transpiration from trees and the storage of water in soils. Harmful subsidies are also distorting the world’s water systems, and must be addressed as a priority, the experts found......read on          https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/16/global-water-crisis-food-production-at-risk