UN conference hears litany of water disasters linked to climate crisis

Accounts of global impact of floods, droughts and storms at New York meeting add to pressure to make water central to Cop28

Water is at the heart of the climate crisis, with an increasingly dire carousel of droughts, floods and sea level rise felt making our planet uninhabitable" the secretary-general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, has warned.

On the second day of the first UN water conference in almost half a century, countries lined up to describe how they are suffering from water disasters linked to human-made global heating. We seem to either have too much water, or too little," said Senzo Mchunu, South Africa's water minister. We will fail on climate change if we fail on water."