Too much. Too little. Too polluted.

For years these compact phrases, mantra-like in their repetition, have come to define the world’s water problems.

Now add a fourth: too frequent.

If nothing else, the last 12 months of floods, fires, droughts, and other meteorological torments delivered an uncomfortable message. Extreme events are happening more often. And they are happening almost everywhere.

Communities rich and poor bore witness to horrific devastation in 2021. In July, floods in China’s Henan province trapped commuters in subway tunnels in the city of Zhengzhou, which received as much rain in three days as it does in an average year. That same month, raging waters in Germany’s Ahr Valley scoured farmland into canyons and submerged riverside towns. Herders in northern Kenya today are lamenting the decimation of their livestock as seasonal rains failed yet again to nourish the ochre earth.

One positive trend is that severe weather is not as deadly as it was generations ago. Thanks to superior weather forecasting, early warning systems, insurance schemes, and an established network of international aid agencies, the initial blow from a flood or drought is less lethal. With advance warning, residents can find safe ground. Death tolls are typically measured in the hundreds instead of the tens of thousands.

The pain is instead distributed in other ways. Homes washed away. Dry wells. Persistent hunger after failed harvests and reliance on food aid. Rebuilding again and again like this is wearying. People on the Louisiana Gulf Coast and the Sahel, in central Africa, have come to see their homelands as places of danger. Some want to move. Their neighbors may already have.

Limiting the damage from a fevered planet was the goal of a U.N. climate summit in November. Negotiators made incremental progress in Glasgow, but the world’s carbon trajectory is still off course for keeping the global average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was two centuries ago.

Coming out of the summit, climate campaigners accused political leaders of another compact phrase — of being too timid. Low-carbon energy plans could be deployed quicker. More money could flow to poorer countries to aid adaptation to severe storms. Fossil fuel subsidies could be ratcheted down. Carbon-trapping forests and wetlands, which also filter water and calm floods, could be protected from plows and shovels.

Without a greater sense of urgency this decade, the hill to climb becomes much steeper. Future leaders don’t want to find themselves adding another phrase to the list: too late.