World Water Day

This hands-on training provides participants with practical experience in the design, construction, and deployment of Open Hardware sensor systems for water management. UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme , in collaboration with international and regional partners, organize a training workshop on open hardware and Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions for water resources management from 23 to 25 March 2026 in Quito, Ecuador. Open hardware and IoT technologies are transforming water resources management by offering low-cost, locally adaptable solutions for water monitoring and decision-making. Rooted in the principles of open science, these approaches promote data sharing, collaboration, transparency and reproducibility, enabling institutions and communities to build, understand, and maintain their own monitoring systems. The three-day training programme combines live demonstrations, hands-on exercises, and field-based learning. On the first day, participants be introduced to ...

The UNESCO and the Government of Tabasco established the Advisory Committee for the Water Security Plan of the Mezcalapa–Samaria Sub-basin. UNESCO and the Government of Tabasco established the Advisory Committee for the Water Security Plan for the Mezcalapa–Samaria Sub-basin on January 27 to strengthen water security and climate change adaptation in seven municipalities of Tabasco, Mexico. The Committee will support the implementation of the Plan developed with the UNESCO scientific guidance and a comprehensive approach. The Committee is a structured platform for dialogue, coordination, and advisory support to integrate, monitor, and promote the Water Security Plan, to strengthen community resilience to the impacts of flooding. The Advisory Committee will promote the implementation of high-priority actions for the region, including modelling to improve the Early Warning System in collaboration with journalists and media outlets; establishing comprehensive emergency response protocols; ...

Find out how new technology is unveiling the pivotal role of groundwater in protecting ecosystems and providing valuable data to inform integrated policies and programmatic decisions.

  2.1 billion people still live without safely-managed drinking water. Another 3.4 billion live without safely managed sanitation. Water has its own Sustainable Development Goal - #SDG6 - because it is a fundamental human right, crucial for health and environment.   Follow the conversations with the hashtags:  #WaterAction

The new UN-Water GLAAS 2025 report is out today: State of systems for drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene: Global update 2025. 105 countries highlight what’s holding WASH services back, and what it will take to accelerate progress to #SDG6 . The GLAAS 2025 report, State of systems for drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene: global update 2025 , and Key Findings of the Report were launched on 26 January 2026 at the High-Level Preparatory Meeting for the 2026 UN Water Conference in Dakar, Senegal. One hundred and five countries and 21 development partners participated in the GLAAS 2024/2025 cycle. The report examines the status of key components of WASH systems: policy, plans, institutional arrangements and national targets; monitoring, review and use of data for decision-making; regulation and surveillance; human resources; and finance . The report provides an expanded analysis of the two SDG 6 means of implementation targets and indicators: (6.a) international cooperation and ca...

Taken together, these trends point to a structural transformation of the global water cycle that goes beyond crisis. Humanity has already pushed the freshwater cycle beyond its safe operating space . The global freshwater boundary has been transgressed, alongside boundaries for climate, biosphere integrity, and land systems. This means that the Earth system in the Anthropocene is operating outside the range of variability that supported the relatively stable Holocene conditions under which human societies developed. Crucially, many of the damages are irreversible or effectively irreversible on human time scales. Compacted aquifers do not rebound, subsided deltas  do not rise, extinct species do not return, and lost glaciers and wetlands cannot be restored within planning horizons. Even where partial restoration is technically possible, the costs are often prohibitive, and the climate and socioeconomic conditions that supported past states no longer exist. The available evide...

  Increasing scarcity of water is not only a story of declining volumes. It is equally a story of water that is physically present but no longer fit for purpose. Globally, a large share of municipal and industrial wastewater is still released to the environment untreated or only partially treated, while diffuse pollution from agriculture—nutrients, pesticides, pathogens and sediments—degrades rivers, lakes, reservoirs and coastal waters. In many rapidly urbanizing basins, downstream communities face a hydrological paradox : river flows may be sufficient in purely volumetric terms, yet much of that water cannot be used safely for drinking, irrigation, or recreation without costly treatment and poses serious risks to human and ecosystem health. Groundwater systems face similar pressures. Nitrate contamination from fertilizers and livestock, industrial pollutants , and naturally occurring arsenic andfluoride mobilized by deeper pumping have rendered some aquifers unsafe for dri...

Water shortages around the world can no longer be described as seasonal or exceptional. Around 4 billion people already live with severe water scarcity for at least one month every year . In many regions, water scarcity is increasingly driven by persistent long-term over-extraction and quality degradation rather than only by climatic variability. In many systems, water scarcity is therefore defined not only by how much water is available , but by how much of that water meets basicquality standards for human use, food production, and ecosystem health; polluted water or saline water may still appear in volumetric accounts, yet functionally it behaves as if it were not there.  Over 1.8 billion people—nearly one in four humans—were living under drought conditions in 2022–2023 , with the vast majority of them in low- and middle-income countries. Drought-related damages, intensified by land degradation, groundwater depletion, and climate change rather than by rainfall deficits alone,...

  Agriculture accounts for over 70% of global freshwater withdrawals , providing food, employment opportunities, and stable livelihoods to billions of people. But about 3 billion people and over half of the world’s food production are located in regions that are already experiencing, or are projected to face, declining trends in total water storage — including surface water, soil moisture, snow, ice, and groundwater—driven largely by groundwater depletion  and irrigation . Around 1.2 billion people already live in agricultural areas facing severe water constraints , and over 170 million hectares of irrigated cropland, roughly the combined land area of France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, are under high or very high water stress. These conditions translate directly into food insecurity as well as employment and income shocks. In many low- and middle-income countries, agriculture still accounts for 25–60% of total employment; when water shortages reduce yields or force fallowi...

  Cryospheric decline compounds the existing pressures on water resources. The world, in multiple locations, has already lost over 30% of its glacier mass since 1970, and several low-latitude mountain ranges risk losing functional glaciers entirely within decades, eliminating long-standing natural savings accounts that once buffered seasonal water shortages . Snowpack and permafrost degradation add further uncertainty to water availability and storage in highlatitude and high-altitude systems. In glacier-fed basins across Asia, the Andes, and other mountain regions, communities are already experiencing a transition from “peak water” — a period of temporarily increased melt and runoff—to declining flows, with implications for hydropower, irrigation, and ecological integrity. Mountain glaciers and seasonal snowpacks function as the “water towers of the world,” storing cool-season precipitation and releasing it as meltwater during dry and warm periods. The downstream water suppl...

 Groundwater now supplies about 50% of domestic water use and over 40% of irrigation water worldwide, making many urban areas, food systems, and farming communities heavily dependent on aquifers that are being depleted faster than they can recharge17. Groundwater depletion continues accelerating, and the planet’s groundwater storage is declining. About 70% of the world’s major aquifers exhibit long-term declining trends, many of them effectively irreversible on human time scales due to compaction and loss of aquifer storage capacity9,18–21. In parallel, groundwater quality is being degraded by salinity, nitrate and pesticide contamination from agriculture, industrial and mining pollution, and naturally occurring arsenic and fluoride mobilized by deeper pumping, rendering parts of some aquifers physically present but economically and ecologically unusable. The consequences of unsustainable groundwater exploitation are already visible on the land surface not only through the increas...

Around one-third of the word's basins experience significant flow alterations.  More than half of the world's large lakes have declined. Around 35% of the world's wetlands have been lost Quality degradation further accelerates the finctional loss of of these surface water. Paired satellite images (4–5 TM and Landsat 8–9 Level-2 true-color) showing the shrinkage of: 1) the world's third largest lake, Aral Sea (1989, topleft vs. 2025 top-right), lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; and 2) the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, Great Salt Lake, U.S.A . (1986, bottom left vs. 2022, bottom-right) due to increased upstream water use and reduced inflows, illustrating parallel declines of large inland lakes Figure 4. Global human exposure to wildfire . The map on top shows cumulative human exposure to wildfire in each country from 2002-2021 and the plot on the bottom shows the continuous growth in the number of people who are exposed to wildfires globally ,...

 The impacts of the chronic drawdown of both surface water and groundwater resources go beyond humanwater systems. These trends continue to destroy and degrade the silent stakeholder: the environment. They liquidate our natural capital. The degrading natural capital is further intensifying environmental and climatic changes through reinforcing feedback loops. The stationary baseline ecosystem services that we built our societies, economies, and institutions based on no longer exist. The accelerating, degrading changes, which our own actions continue to contribute to, narrow the margin for error in water management , leaving societies more exposed to extremes and less able to smooth variability over time. The global observations reinforce the picture of a structural overshoot. Many human-water systems are operating beyond their hydrological carrying capacity , with irreversible damages to the environment and global natural capital. In these regions, crisis management aimed at res...

  The warnings about a global water crisis were necessary and timely. However, they were framed as alerts about a future that could still be avoided. This  UNU-INWEH report warns that the world has already moved into a new phase. The question is no longer whether a crisis can be averted everywhere, but how to govern in a world where many human–water systems have already failed to the point that previous conditions cannot be restored. To capture this new condition, the report adopts the newly developed water bankruptcy concept. The notion of “water bankruptcy” builds on a simple but powerful analogy with financial bankruptcy. In finance, bankruptcy is declared when an entity has spent beyond its means for so long, and accumulated such unsustainable debts, that it cannot meet its obligations. Declaring bankruptcy is both an admission of failure and the first step toward a fresh start: claims are written down, expectations are reset, and a new, more realistic balance sheet is ne...

  The current era is increasingly described as the Anthropocene : a term used to capture the extent to which human activities now dominate and reshape key components of the Earth system. It is marked by the scale and speed of human-driven change in climate , land use , biogeochemical cycles , and biodiversity, far beyond the range of natural variability in recent history. Water is at the center of this transformation . Over the past century, societies have drastically reconfigured the global water cycle. Dams, diversions, drainage works, and canals have transformed river systems. Irrigation, land-use change, and groundwater pumping have altered evapotranspiration and recharge patterns. Greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the atmosphere and oceans, changing precipitation regimes , snowpack, glacier mass balance and the intensity of extremes. Population growth, urbanization, and economic expansion have increased water demand for agriculture, industry, energy and cities . These pr...