World Water Day

 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...

  Globally, built reservoir capacity per person is decreasing, as reservoir expansion has not been able to keep pace with population growth, but also because storage capacity of existing reservoirs is decreasing, chiefly due to sedimentation . The  Average annual storage volume losses equal about 1% of total built reservoir capacity, and the estimated costs for restoring these losses are approximately US$13 billion per year. An assessment of the value of storage capacity for Enhancing water security in the world’s 400 largest river basins identified water shortage risks in many parts of Africa, as well as in Australia, northern China, India, Spain and the western USA. There are widespread declines in total water storage and associated freshwater availability that are primarily attributed to the intensive overextraction of groundwater and an increasing Temperature-induced surface water loss .