In the early morning hours of July 4, 2025, torrential rains stormed down in central Texas, triggered by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry. By 6:45 a.m. local time, the Guadalupe River rose from less than one foot to more than 34 feet, leading to massive flooding that killed 135 people, most of them in Kerr County, including about 40 children.
The devastation could cost the state up to $22 billion, according to AccuWeather. The disaster was cited in the State of Global Water Resources 2025, which the World Meteorological Organization released Thursday. Now in its fifth edition, the report pairs its usual year-in-review with a five-year synthesis of how the planet’s entire water cycle is changing.
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What it found suggests the Texas flood wasn’t a one-off incident. It’s just one example of a pattern showing up across the globe.
What the study found
The report’s main finding is that the global water cycle is acting almost like a pendulum, violently swinging between extreme drought and extreme flooding. For seven straight years, the report found, the share of the world’s river basins with “normal” flow has stayed below the historical average, just 34-38%, compared with a 46% historical average. Global land water storage, things like rivers, lakes and groundwater, has been declining since the mid-2010s, with the report noting that land is “holding less fresh water than before.”
But if things are getting drier, why is flooding so prevalent? The report found its answer in Texas itself. The region was under multi-year drought from 2020 to 2024, before catastrophic rain hit in 2025. A U.S. Geological Survey spokesperson told Straight Arrow that they’ve confirmed the same pattern firsthand.
“Extreme drought conditions preceded the event resulting in dry antecedent conditions,” the spokesperson said.
The basin’s thin soil sits on limestone bedrock that acts almost like pavement, the spokesperson said. The rain couldn’t soak in, so it ran straight off into rivers that were already flooding.
The report attributes the pattern to a warmer atmosphere and oceans, which are reshaping evaporation, rainfall and runoff worldwide.
Worldwide effects
The report found similar patterns in other regions of the world. The Greater Horn of Africa, in eastern Africa, endured a multi-year drought from 2020 to 2022 — the most severe on record for the region. By late 2023, those conditions reversed sharply. Heavy rains tied to El Niño and a warm Indian Ocean brought significant flooding. By last year, the region had swung back into drought, triggering a state of emergency in Somalia, the report stated.
South and Southeast Asia saw similar swings. In 2025, tropical storms compounded by intense rainfall killed more than 3,600 people across the region. Vietnam alone was hit by 11 typhoons in a single year, one of its most severe typhoon seasons in decades, the report found.
The same year marked the fourth consecutive year every major glaciated region on Earth lost ice mass, according to the report. Areas like parts of western Canada and the U.S., and Asia’s western Himalaya may have already passed “peak water,” meaning their glacier meltwater contribution to rivers has started shrinking rather than growing.
The human cost
The report laid out the human toll these changing patterns create in clear numbers.
Between 2021 and 2025, about 1,500 water-related extreme events caused at least 62,500 deaths globally.
Africa was the hardest hit, with nearly 31,000 deaths, nearly half the total. Much of that, the report found, was from a single catastrophic event: the 2023 Libya floods, which killed about 13,500 people.
But the report said that the 62,500 number is just a floor, not a full count. In a footnote, it said these figures “should be read as minimum estimates.” Drought deaths are undercounted because fatalities from prolonged water scarcity and food insecurity are rarely attributed to a single event like flooding, the report said, meaning the true toll is likely higher.
The pattern isn’t confined to just those parts of the world. The report flagged persistent groundwater deficits since 2022 in California and the southern High Plains, a major area for U.S. grain and cattle-feed production.
Continued threat
The report ends in 2025, but the weather patterns it researched continued into this year.
In late August, a catastrophic flash flood struck the Nepal-China border after a chunk of bedrock and ice broke free high in the Himalayas. The resulting surge of water, mud and debris rushed down river corridors into Nepal, leveling towns and killing more than 1,400 people, with thousands more still missing.
The WMO’s report doesn’t predict what would happen in the future. Its scope explicitly offered a retrospective look at the data. But the tragedy in Nepal shows the pressure behind those patterns isn’t easing up.
Round out your reading
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- Some question whether a popular affordable housing policy is making the nation’s home shortage worse.
- Kelvin wave incoming: Why the US should care.
