Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
United Nations, Oct 8. - The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has just certified today what the world knew from its own sufferings: the year 2023 set a planetary record for global warming causing the depletion of water sources.
As if that were not enough, this meteorological anomaly led to the prolongation of droughts in various corners of the planet, especially Africa, where thousands of people died or barely survived from the lack of water and lost crops and livestock on which their very existence depended.
As an example, it cites the 130 deaths caused in November last year by flash floods in countries in the Horn of Africa seen only every 100 years.
The persistence of heat wave temperatures in places as distant as southern and eastern Africa, Asia and South America, was so brutal that it evaporated rivers, lakes, groundwater, glaciers and did not even spare the humidity of the land and plants, highlights the WMO report, issued at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland and disseminated in this East African country.
It also emphasizes that “water is the basis of life, but it can also be a destructive source (…) one of the results of this study is that water is increasingly unpredictable, with erratic hydrological cycles causing floods and brutal droughts and climate change responsible for these extreme behaviors.”
The text takes on a dramatic character when it points out that “we have never witnessed such a vast global area under such dry conditions in the 33 years since the beginning of our data collection on the subject (…) so we consider that (2023) is the driest year.”
It is reported that the Amazon River, which runs through several South American countries, and Lake Titicaca, suffered severe drought conditions while, in contrast, areas of Oceania suffered flooding.
The group, created in 1950 in the shadow of the UN, called for the improvement of data collection to develop a clearer picture of water resources and help countries and communities adopt actions to respond to the crisis that is increasingly acquiring reliefs of biblical punishment to humans for their misdeeds. (Text and Photo: Cubasí)
