Water – Too much and not enough | DW Documentary
The consequences of climate change are far-reaching. How is global warming affecting our atmosphere? Are we already experiencing a water crisis? Or is a world without adequate water just a potential dystopian future?
Water forms the basis for all life on Earth. It has shaped human activity and influenced the development of entire societies. Water has always been a mainstay of health, prosperity and power. Water means life or death.
However, changes are emerging in the Earth’s water cycle. These have tangible effects on people and the environment. The catastrophic consequences of extreme weather events range from too much water to widespread droughts. But how can this be, on a planet where 70 per cent of the surface is covered by water?
Experts around the world are urging us to rethink the way we use water. Fresh water accounts for only 2.5 percent of the total volume of water on earth. Of this small proportion, only 0.03 percent is found in rivers, wetlands, lakes, soil and the atmosphere and is therefore more or less easily accessible to humans.
Water is practically never “lost” on Earth. But precipitation volumes and zones are changing. Extreme weather conditions last longer and become more intense. The consequences are obvious and far-reaching. Drinking water shortages, dwindling water levels in lakes and rivers, floods and mudslides are increasingly becoming the focus of media coverage.
Consumption must not simply continue to rise from year to year. Rather, we must make better use of what is available to us. On the one hand, this means using extracted water more efficiently and, on the other, finding solutions to adapt to the new circumstances.
#documentary #dwdocumentary #dwdocs #water #climatechange
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Video “Water – Too much and not enough | DW Documentary” was uploaded on 08/06/2025 by DW Documentary Youtube channel.
Only 3% of Earth's water is cleanwater!?! We are doomed. Support science and desalination investments.
10:57: According to the simulation, North Africa and East Africa will actually see increased rainfall or precipitation as global warming increases. How is that possible? Can someone please explain this to me????????
Bible is right end times are coming.
Rome was built. Rome has fallen. Rome was forged in Blood. Rome had been made unto the image we are familiar with . For one reason and one reason only. Aside from the madness of murder and slavery! Rome was built to create the environment for a super civilization. Rome called itself the first super civilization of the World! We are not in Rome. Yet we live out our lives here"when in Rome do as the Romans".
Meat is murder .
Hahaha sad but true.
Commish
Turn this deadbeat planet back around.
Long live my Highness!
Commish
Water power and the wind. Winds create waves in Ocean and Lakes. After neglect of water power in favor of fire power? The winds have died down, in order to be replaced by the dead space of neutral barometric ionosphere. We won't actually be able to discern the extensions of this change until the reverse tipping point has been reached.
Explanation: when the oil gauge in the auto in begins to run high into the heat alert, it takes time for the real feel barometric to register and reach full manifestation.
We are running our lives with half blinders covering our senses. This is the palpable side effects from VR and AI. No doubt.
Commish
Wading through water and carrying on the head is very ineffective and can only provide for minimal living standards. Please refer to the plumbing aqueducts and architecture of Persia, where water could be plumbed across many miles of desert. Utilizing ceramic plumbing is how you could provide water for whole communities, sustainable, non-toxic and is called the qanat system.
Fire power and the civilized world. It is the concept of water power which we have foregone, as civilized people.
Naturally everywhere. Fire is found in few places throughout nature; actual fire with flames and dangerously hot gasses. Water power is everywhere; humans fail to grasp correctly. Instead; fire power for the people. Now how we die our civilized lives. Humph.
Commish
Climate data show that the total amount rain that will fall every year in the world will increase as the planet becomes warmer, since oceans are getting warmer, which cause more evaporation.
However, the warmer the air is, the more humidity it can contain before getting saturated with water. Thus, this means that while the total rainfall will increase on Earth, rain will fall less often in many regions, and in others there will be an increase in the likelihood of extreme rainfall which can cause flooding.
We already see this happening right now, with regions experiencing never seen droughts, while other regions get unprecedented flooding year after year
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Towns and cities need to create swales and reservoirs to slow down currents and redirect away from human settlements. Reservoirs will allow water to seep into the ground. This is being done in India. Take a look at “Sponge city” designs in China where areas are designated to flood.
You know when egypt was a rainforest 10,000 years ago? The earth is going through another weather pattern change. Happens all the time in the history of the planet. People contribute sure but its a natural process.
The UN's IPCC AR6 report, chapter 11 'Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate' summarises the fact that certain severe weather events cannot be detected as increasing, nor attributed to human caused climate change:
Pages 1761 – 1765, Table 11.A.2 Synthesis table summarising assessments
Heavy Precipitation: 24 out of 45 global regions low confidence in observed trend (12 medium confidence), 43 out of 45 low confidence in human attribution.
Agricultural Drought: 31 out of 45 global regions low confidence in observed trend
(14 medium confidence. No high confidence assessment). 42 out 45 low confidence in human attribution (3 medium, no high confidence).
Ecological Drought as above.
Hydrological Drought: 38 out of 45 global regions low confidence in observed trend.
43 out 45 low confidence in human attribution (2 medium confidence, no high confidence).
So the IPCC are saying we didn't cause droughts and we didn't make it rain. How surprising!
Thanks for a great documentary
Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). A study by Venter et al (2018) found the Sahara desert had shrunk by 8% over the previous three decades. The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature. Increased CO2 causes this in two ways: it has a direct fertilising effect (the CFE), and it increases drought tolerance by reducing stomata. This greening of the Earth due to CO2 is now "an indisputable fact" (Chen et al, 2024). In fact, 55.15% of those areas greening have been doing so at an accelerated rate since 2001. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the Earth's primary productivity has increased by more than 30% (Campbell et al, 2017 and Haverd et al, 2020).
"Drink up dreamers, your're running dry." -Peter Gabriel in the song Here Comes The Flood (1977)
Ask Nestle why there’s no water anymore!
And some idiotic people think that burning coal is cleaner than solar or wind AND there's apparently some magical weather weapon(?) the clean energy people can use to cause hurricanes
1:05 lol there is even a scientific study already with a person surviving 1 year without food
Thank you for a very interesting video. Humans are extremely wasteful and not just with water. But water is so essential to life. People think because it rains there is no shortage of water. The more people who watch videos like this the better.
Are they using microwaves in the upper atmosphere to heat global winds?
Slowing water down is one of the solutions.
How the world would look like once global warming melts the glacier and it floods year on year is mainly relocating of water to some regions and rest will go in drought perhaps in next 7 years. Onwards less water may impact agriculture and food insecurity would be next big thing.
Maybe households should ha ve limits. If we need or want to use more install structures to store personal water collection..
Population growth is amazing and the amount of water that fliws directly to the sea is to much to quick why this is is because many development along creeks pipe water when raining years ago where no buildings it goes into the ground but not now it fliws to the creek then river then sea and along gets that poluted it toxic.
Rivers should wiggle far more often, by design. Further, retaining runoff in reservoirs, lakes, ponds, and via weirs and underground tanks have to become a new feature of sovereign wealth and asset building.
Needless to say, returning fauna back to the wild is by far the easiest means to bringing nature back to both abundance and balance.
Water is for the toilet, drink Brando instead
And now they are building a massive AI data centre in Brazil among this drought crisis that will require millions of litres of fresh water. I don’t think it could be any clearer that the world’s problems are caused by lack of proper management, and it’s not just the water crisis I’m talking about.
Just need to make the soil able to absorb the rain. This will replenish ground water…
Thank you for the documentary. Not enough people realize there's a fresh water situation, let alone how severe it is.
Also, tangentially related, It feels like my youtube algorithm is trying to compensate.
As american public broadcasters are getting their funding stripped and the government is trying to (and has) put a stop to a lot of science funding, I've begun to get recommendations from other countries' public broadcasting services.
Which is cool to see granted (the algorithm at work that is), but it's awful how I got here.
This is where water pipelines would make a big difference in stabilizing water levels across regions.
We cause a lot of the water deficiency. Agriculture monocultures that overuse groundwater, promote runoff, and don't replenish water tables. People overuse and waste much groundwater and rivers.