In 2025, the global water cycle was shaped by intensifying extremes, rapid shifts between wet and dry conditions, and major events in unexpected places and times of year.

This is the main conclusion of the annual summary report just released by the Global Water Monitor Consortium, an international partnership of public and private organisations. We combine ground station and satellite data to provide near-real-time information on a global scale on rainfall, air temperature, humidity, soil and groundwater conditions, terrestrial water storage, vegetation access to water, river flows, flooding, and lake volumes. All data is freely available and can be visualised, explored and downloaded through the Global Water Monitor data explorer.

The 2025 summary report provides the latest information on trends in the water cycle and on major water-related disasters. Some of the key findings include:

• Water-related disasters in 2025 caused nearly 5,000 deaths, displaced around 8 million people, and resulted in economic losses exceeding US$360 billion globally.
   
• Extreme rainfall is intensifying globally, with maximum daily precipitation increasing 2.3% per decade, contributing to floods and landslides.
   
• The past three years were the hottest on record worldwide, confirming a persistent warming trend.
   
• Hot days exceeding 35 °C have been increasing by 8.3% per decade, threatening human health, ecosystems, and agricultural systems.
   
• Climate whiplash amplified disaster impacts, with rapid transitions between wet and dry conditions affecting the same regions in quick succession. In Spain and Portugal, a wet spring was followed by flash drought and severe wildfires within months.
   
• Flash droughts are emerging as an increasingly distinct hazard, driven by rapid declines in soil moisture and water storage over days to weeks rather than gradual seasonal drying.
   
• Water-related hazards appeared in unlikely places and at unprecedented frequencies, including an equatorial cyclone affecting Indonesia and unprecedented glacial lake outburst floods in the Hindu Kush Himalaya.
   
• Risks developing for 2026 include drought building across the Mediterranean, the Horn of Africa, Brazil, and Central Asia, with wet conditions in the Sahel, southern Africa, northern Australia, and much of Asia making flooding more likely.
   

Together, these findings point to a global water system under growing stress, where faster hydrological change and rising temperatures are reshaping risks to people, ecosystems and infrastructure.

The main report, reports for individual countries, and the global data explorer can be accessed via https://www.globalwater.online/ 

About the Global Water Monitor Consortium

The Global Water Monitor Consortium, led by Prof. Albert van Dijk of the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, annually publishes a summary of developments in the global water cycle for the previous year. A key objective is to provide the most up-to-date data as quickly as possible to inform the public and decision-makers. With this approach, the report is consistently "the first" in a series of global reports (e.g., from the WMO, the EU, etc.).

The GFZ (German Research Centre for Geosciences), represented by Dr. Julian Haas and Prof. Andreas Güntner (Section 4.4 – Hydrology) and Dr. Eva Boergens (Section 1.3 – Earth System Modelling), is contributing data on Total Water Storage for the third consecutive time, i.e. for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 reports. This utilizes data from the GFZ's GravIS platform and the newly established service within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Terrestrial Water Storage Anomaly, developed by the aforementioned colleagues.