Kabul faces most severe water shortage

CNN :

As the sun rises over Kabul’s parched mountains, a family’s daily struggle to find water – and to make it last – is about to begin.

The sound of water tankers rumbling through Raheela’s neighborhood in the Afghan capital prompts the 42-year-old mother of four to rush out to the street to fill her family’s battered buckets and jerrycans.

The family’s supply is always running low, she says, and every liter is expensive, stretching nerves and their budgets to breaking point.

“We don’t have access to (drinking) water at all,” Raheela, who goes by one name, told CNN. “Water shortage is a huge problem affecting our daily life.”

Kabul is inching toward catastrophe. It could soon become the first modern capital in the world to run completely dry according to a recent report by Mercy Corps, a non-government organization that warns the crisis could lead to economic collapse.

Meanwhile, The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned that Kabul’s groundwater could be fully depleted by 2030, driven by rapid urbanization and the intensifying impacts of climate change.

UNICEF reported that Roza Otunbayeva, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), along with Tajudeen Oyewale, UNICEF’s Afghanistan representative, recently conducted visits to several water-scarce areas in Kabul. Their visit aimed to explore potential solutions to the worsening water shortage.