UN World Water Development Report 2025 published on World Water Day and first-ever World Day for Glaciers

On March 21st, the UN World Water Development Report  2025, entitled “Mountains and glaciers – Water towers”, was published by UNESCO on behalf of UN-Water. UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) coordinated its production with inputs from the broaderUN-Water family. The annual report was launched at a joint celebration for World Water Day and the first-ever World Day for Glaciers. The Report is aligned with this year being named the International Year of Glacier Preservation and it builds on the 2022 resolution of the UN General Assembly on sustainable mountain development. 

The report kicks off with the status of the world’s water resources, stating that global freshwater withdrawals are still growing at an average rate of 0,7% per year, which is mainly driven by cities, countries and regions undergoing rapid economic development. The report also notes that mountains provide 60% of the world’s annual freshwater flows, and some two billion people depend directly on these mountain waters. As the ‘water towers’ of the world, mountains are an essential source of fresh water. They are vital for meeting basic human needs such as water supply and sanitation.  

Half of the world population, approximately 4 billion people, experience severe water scarcity during at least one month a year. Our current progress towards the achievement all SDG6 targets is off track – and we are significantly off track for some of these targets. For example, an estimated 2.2 billion people, representing 27% of the global population, were without access to safely managed drinking water in 2022, with four of five people living in rural areas lacking even basic levels of drinking water services. The situation concerning sanitation is worse, with 3.5 billion people worldwide lacking access to safely managed sanitation in 2002. Although much progress has been made in monitoring the other (more recently added) global water targets from SDG 6.3 on water quality to SDG 6.6 on water related ecosystems, accurate global assessment is still impeded by data gaps and deficiencies in monitoring. 

The report calls attention to the essential services and benefits mountain waters and alpine glaciers provide to societies, economies and the environment. Most of the world’s glaciers, including those in mountains, are melting at an increasing rate, which will aggravate global crises. Glacier retreat is only the visible part of the threat – in many regions freshwater flows depend more on seasonal snowpack melt than on glaciers. Moreover, the consequences of climate change can affect flood and landslide risks, posing significant threats to communities, wildlife and infrastructure. Also, rapid and unplanned urbanisation in mountain regions is placing pressure on the fragile ecosystems, affecting water availability, water quality and water security. 

With a focus on the technical and policy responses required to improve water management in mountains, the report covers critical issues: 

Climate change mitigation and adaptation takes place by changing farming practices, by developing infrastructure including water storage, through the application and adaptation of Indigenous knowledge and through community-based capacity building and ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA).

In terms of food and energy security, agriculture and pastoralism are essential sources of livelihoods for people in rural mountain areas and these communities possess unique and valuable local knowledge, traditions and cultural practices. Terrace farming has numerous benefits and can be adapted to local slope conditions, for instance by reducing soil erosion and reducing surface water runoff. 

To make production in the industries more sustainable, the circular economy approach  advocates reducing, recycling and reusing water resources in these areas, next to the introduction of environmentally sound technologies, better resource management and efficient waste recycling. Greening or replacing ‘grey’ infrastructure with ‘green’ infrastructure has proven to be particularly effective in mountain areas.

Disaster risk reduction for human settlements focuses on the roughly 1.1 billion people in mountain regions. Hazards such as landslides, earthquakes, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF’s) and avalanches increase their vulnerability and destabilise the agricultural and tourism sectors and biodiversity. Examples of adaptation action in mountain regions include: feasibility studies for building emergency storage and bypasses and controlled releases from glacial lakes; river basin management and planning for basin optimisation; monitoring temporal changes in glaciers; and establishing GLOF risk reduction and early warning systems in glaciated river basins. 

Examples of ecosystem protection are the conservation or restoration of ecosystem functionality, to maintain or enhance ecosystem services at local to regional scales, through nature-based solutions (NbS) or ecosystem-based adaptation. These approaches play a role in the nationally determined contributions of many mountain countries around the world.  

The report includes regional perspectives and emphasises the need for knowledge- and capacity-building. According to the report, the role of water governance in mountains needs more attention as well as the more costly aspect of water management in mountain regions: the rugged terrain and poor accessibility, restrictions on economies of scale, long distance from seaports and economic centres, and poorly developed industrial and service sectors all drive the costs of water management up in these regions. In many cases impactful solutions require a multilateral, partnership approach, as is for instance shown by the co leading role of WMO in the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation  and the Decade Of Action for Cryoshperic Sciences (2025-2034), which will give rise to a new impetus for international cooperation.

 

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