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According to a new study, climate change’s hotter temperatures and society’s diversion of water have been shrinking the world’s lakes by trillions of gallons of water a year since the early 1990s.
In the past 30 years, more than half of the world’s large lakes and reservoirs have shrunk due to the climate crisis and human consumption.
This is according to a new study, which has intensified concerns about water supply for agriculture, hydropower, and our future survival.
Published in the journal Science, the research analysed almost 2,000 of the world’s most important freshwater sources, from the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia to South America’s Lake Titicaca.
It found them to have lost water at a cumulative rate of about 22 gigatonnes a year for nearly three decades, which is equivalent to the total water use in the US for the entire year of 2015.
Using satellite observations (namely images from Landsat, the world’s longest-running Earth observation programme) climate data, and hydrologic models, it uncovered significant storage declines in 53 per cent of these water bodies between 1992 and 2020.
As it states, unsustainable human use, changes in rainfall and run-off, sedimentation, and rising temperatures are primarily to blame.
Fangfang Yao, a surface hydrologist at the University of Virginia who led the study, said that 56 per cent of the decline was driven by global heating and human consumption, with warming ‘the larger share of that.’
The diversion of water from lakes – a direct human cause of shrinkage – is probably larger and more noticeable because it is ‘very acute, very local, and it has the capability of really changing the landscape,’ said co-author Ben Livneh, a University of Colorado hydrologist.
