By Dylan Baddour , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: The Romanian Navy is blasting out the Danube River bed to maintain the flow of cooling water to a nuclear power plant as a continent-wide drought dries up rivers across Europe. ...The plant’s operator, Nuclearelectrica, shut down Unit 1 due to low water last week, warning in a press release last Wednesday that, without intervention, “Unit 2 will be shut down in a controlled manner due to the extremely low, unprecedented level of the Danube, caused by severe drought.” One thousand miles away, officials in the Netherlands last week announced the lowest levels ever measured on Europe’s third largest river, the Rhine. In a press release Thursday , the Dutch national government said drought was disrupting commercial traffic on the river system and causing intrusion of salty seawater into water supplies meant for crop irrigation. ...In Italy, the Po River Basin Authority reported on Thursday that 101 municipalities faced medium-to-high ...

By Kenny Torrella, Vox.  Excerpt: More than one in 10 Americans rely on the Colorado River to take showers and drink clean water. But with no end in sight to the decades-long drought in the western US and rapidly decreasing river levels, this essential resource is fueling bitter disputes over who, exactly, should be cutting back on water. This fight has been coming to a head especially among the seven states that make up the Colorado River Compact — California, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming — as well as a sliver of Mexico and over 20 tribal nations that rely on the 1.9 trillion gallons of water pulled from the Colorado River for use each year. ...Farming accounts for about 75 percent of annual Colorado River water usage, according to a 2024  paper  published in the journal  Nature Communications Earth & Environment . But not all agricultural sectors are equally thirsty. While a small share of the Colorado River water is used on far...

By Robert F. Service , Science.  Excerpt: More than 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with global warming and competing demands from farms and industry expected to worsen shortages. But the skies may soon provide relief, not in the form of rain but humidity, sucked out of the air by “atmospheric water harvesters.” The devices have existed for decades but typically are too expensive, energy-hungry, or unproductive to be practical. Now, however, two classes of materials called hydrogels and metal-organic frameworks have touched off what Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), calls “an explosion of efforts related to atmospheric water harvesting.”...  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/devices-pull-water-out-thin-air-poised-take . 

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Like heat waves, these periods of high atmospheric demand for water can damage crops and ecosystems and increase pressure on water resources. New research shows they’re becoming more severe. As the climate warms, the atmosphere is getting thirstier. Scientists define this atmospheric thirst, or evaporative demand, as the amount of water that could potentially evaporate from Earth’s surface in response to weather. Standardized short-crop evapotranspiration  (ET os ) is a metric that estimates how much water would evaporate and transpire across a uniform, well-watered grass surface. It is used to measure the evaporative demand experienced by land covered by agricultural crops. Past studies have shown that  ET os  has increased over time  in response to factors such as air temperature, solar radiation, humidity, and wind speed. But that research doesn’t cover patterns and trends over prolonged periods with exceptionally high atm...

By Ki-Weon Seo et al, Science.  Excerpt: When hydrologists Dongryeol Ryu and Ki-Weon Seo saw their results, they were stunned. “ At first we thought, ‘That’s an error in the model,’ ” Ryu told  The Associated Press . But their findings held up to scrutiny:  The water stored on land has been disappearing  . In the last two decades, more than 2600 Gt (billion metric tons) of water that used to be stored in soil, snow, and freshwaters has permanently moved into the ocean, they report in  Science . ...“How climate warming affects Earth’s hydrological cycle—the continuous water movement between Earth and the atmosphere— is a key question for managing water resources and making weather predictions  ,” writes hydrologist Luis Samaniego in an accompanying Perspective. To get a figure they could trust, Ryu, Seo, and their colleagues had to integrate three long-term, global datasets—ones that track water storage anomalies, sea level changes, and the movement of the E...

By Stanley Reed  and Rachel Chaundler , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...tourists filled the cafes and hotel rooms along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, including in Torrevieja, a small city of tightly stacked apartment blocks running along a curved beach. ...low-slung structures house a vast network of pipes, pumps and tanks in a plant that performs a kind of alchemy crucial to the economy of this part of Spain: drawing huge volumes of water from the sea, removing the salt and creating more than 60 million gallons of fresh water a day. Acciona, a Spanish company that built the plant, says the facility can supply water for 1.6 million people through the process known as desalination. For much of the year, though, the output is largely used to nurture oranges, lemons and other crops for consumers in Northern Europe. The Torrevieja plant is the largest of its kind in Europe, and similar plants dot the Spanish coastline. ...With nearly 100 big plants, Spain is the largest user ...

By Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...accessing clean water is an issue for a significant swath of the population, and the situation is only apt to worsen in coming decades, new modeling work reveals. About 55% of the world’s population currently has trouble accessing clean water at least 1 month out of the year, and by 2100, that number could rise above 65%, researchers calculated. Minimizing water scarcity now and into the future will rely on curbing water use, reducing pollution, and mitigating the effects of climate change, the researchers suggest. ... Edward Jones , a hydrology and water quality modeler at Utrecht University in the Netherlands ...Researchers were surprised to find that the worst-case scenario they considered—RCP 8.5 and SSP 5—didn’t result in the largest number of people being exposed to clean water scarcity. The researchers attributed that finding to the increased economic development and heightened water use efficiency built into that particular SSP. T...