What happened?

Shell-shocked residents of Valencia wondered when rain inundated eastern Spain in October. The turbulent floods, a deadly deluge, killed at least 224 people and laid waste to bridges and roads, buildings and fields.

What happened?

Regulators in the United Kingdom asked when Thames Water, the country’s largest water and sewer utility, nearly collapsed financially under a debt pile of its own making.

What happened?

Politicos mused when U.S. voters re-elected Donald Trump, who disdains international alliances and promises to undo environmental protections in favor of oil and gas companies.

Uttered in anguish, introspection, or bewilderment, the question took the form of a global language as people tried to make sense of a chaotic world.

Events that are obscure in the moment often gain clarity in retrospect. The story of 2024 for water, though it is still being written, is one of increasing societal risk that our institutions and our infrastructure are not prepared to withstand. We were not built for this.

The standout events of the past year are an almanac of what can go wrong.

• Barcelona and Bogota – national capitals or commercial centers that are home to millions – rationed water after reservoirs withered, while Mexico City feared that its taps might run dry for the metro area’s 21 million people.
• Zambia, not an energy-rich country to begin with, rationed electricity when water levels in Kariba Reservoir, the world’s largest by capacity, plummeted and hydropower generation was curtailed. The dam produces more than 75 percent of the country’s electricity.
• Streets in Dubai morphed into watercourses following the heaviest cloudburst in seven-plus decades.
• Johannesburg residents endured more water cuts as South Africa’s water sector struggled to fix aging water systems and install competent managers.
• A dam-break in northern Nigeria during heavy rain was blamed on negligent owners. Researchers at IHE Delft warned that dams in conflict zones are a special risk of failure due to neglect or sparse climate data.

With a push from El Niño, it was a year of overwhelming heat. For 15 consecutive months, dating back to 2023, the global average temperature broke a monthly record. Climate scientists say that this year is likely to be the hottest that humans have ever experienced.

Water and climate, of course, are two sides of a coin. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, which is pouring from the sky in colossal storms. Warmer oceans fuel gigantic hurricanes, like Helene that deposited more than two feet of rain in parts of North Carolina. Rising seas lift coastal groundwater levels, intensifying flood risk. Higher temperatures evaporate water more quickly. This atmospheric “thirst” is worsening droughts.

These dynamics are not just conjecture. A paper published in November concluded that the severity of drought in the American West since the turn of the century was more a result of excessive heat than lack of precipitation. A separate study published two months earlier documented a similarly worrying trend for South America: an upsurge of hot, dry weather with low humidity. It is a three-ingredient recipe for fire, and the northern Amazon is especially vulnerable, experiencing three times more of these “triple threat” days a year in the last two decades.

2024 provided evidence of those changes. The Amazon River fell to a record low. Wildfires burned nearly 3.7 million acres of the Pantanal, an area of southern Brazil that is the world’s largest tropical wetland. Fire-related carbon emissions spiked in the region and its air was a health hazard.

A warming climate is to blame for some of these events. But not all – or at least not all the way. Many of the world’s water problems are self-inflicted wounds. Mismanagement, wrong-headed engineering, bad decisions about where to build, and poor leadership do no favors against the backdrop of a destabilizing ecosystem.

It’s frightful stuff for those in high-risk areas who are not wealthy enough for durable personal or social safety nets. Yet amid the disruptions there are signs of forethought, attempts to temper the chaos. Though we were not built for this, we still might build better – both our infrastructure and our institutions.

• Los Angeles city agencies broke ground on a $740 million project that will purify 25 million gallons of wastewater a day. Treated water from the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant will refill groundwater basins in the San Fernando Valley that are sources of drinking water. The investment is the opening act to the much larger Pure Water Southern California, a multibillion-dollar water recycling project spearheaded by a different water agency that will eventually produce 150 million gallons a day from water that currently flows into the Pacific. A draft environmental review is expected next year.
• After its flood disaster, Dubai announced the $8 billion Tasreef project to overhaul its stormwater collection system.
• The Panama Canal Authority began building a new reservoir to expand water storage capacity in the system that feeds the canal locks. Due to drought and a drying Lake Gatun, the authority restricted tanker traffic through the waterway earlier in the year.
• The United Kingdom, wellspring of the Industrial Revolution, retired its last operating coal-fired power plant, ending the long reign of a world-changing and dirty energy source in the country. Coal, in the end, was out-competed by cheaper and less polluting gas and renewable energy.
• At the UN climate conference in Baku, some 57 countries signed a declaration to consider water impacts when they design their climate policies.
• The European Council added water resilience to its five-year agenda, which recognizes that the bloc must respond collectively not just to water pollution but also to water scarcity.

These developments are enough to restate the question with a more generous tone.

What is happening?

Future generations will hope to hear a different response: We acted.