Global Rundown
- Residents of Dar es Salaam — the largest city in Tanzania and home to 8 million people — are relying on water trucks and private suppliers as municipal water shortages mount.
- Multiple extreme flooding events in 2025 were attributed to human-caused climate change, including worsening deluges in Botswana that killed dozens.
- An Australian mining company has secured a 27-acre parcel of land, including two groundwater wells, in California for gold mining and processing.
- Farmers in Hungary, besieged by persistent drought, are working with local thermal spas to create artificial lakes and revive their agricultural economy.
The Lead
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city and one of East Africa’s fastest-growing population centers, is entering the new year while facing a mounting freshwater crisis.
Roughly 70 percent of the city’s water is supplied by the Ruvu River, whose ephemeral flows are usually heaviest from October through December, one of two local rainy seasons. But temperatures routinely exceeding 91 degrees Fahrenheit have amplified a drier-than-usual summer, and the coastal city has few other freshwater sources and lacks a desalination plant. As a result, Dar es Salaam’s roughly 8 million people are increasingly turning to private vendors and water trucks as their taps run dry, placing an acute burden on lower-income neighborhoods, BBC reports.
In early December, the Dar es Salaam Water Supply and Sanitation Authority (DAWASA) imposed restrictions on the usage of Ruvu River water for agriculture, prioritizing instead human consumption. Two weeks before Christmas, DAWASA announced a water service and electricity rationing schedule. Just before the new year, Tanzanian Prime Minister Mwigulu Nchemba directed the country’s Ministry of Water to fast-track the build-out of the $136 million Kidunda Dam, which will increase flows into the city by 90 million liters per day once completed.
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
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This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
157
Global extreme weather events that occurred in 2025, as identified by World Weather Attribution in its end-of-year report. Flooding (49 events) was tied with extreme heat as the most common disaster, and a number of these events — including in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Botswana, and the Mississippi River valley — were determined with certainty to have been caused in part by the effects of a changing climate.
The report highlights Botswana, where extreme rain events are becoming more extreme. The heaviest five-day precipitation event in 2025 in southern Botswana was more intense than every such event over the past 75 years. Rapid urbanization and deforestation make flooding more likely, often overwhelming drainage and sewer systems. A total of 31 people died in the country’s largest floods last year, which were attributed to human-caused climate change.
27
Acres that Dateline Resources, an Australian-based mining company, has secured in California’s Clark Mountain Range — located 45 miles southwest of Las Vegas — to build a processing plant for its gold mining operation, Mining.com.au reports.
The company’s Colosseum Gold Mine, which was acquired in 2021, intends to extract 1.1 million ounces of contained gold, valued at more than half a billion dollars. More than half of this amount is projected to be mined over the next eight years.
Crucially, the new land acquisition includes two groundwater wells that will supply all the water needed for mining and the processing facility, which “will feature a zero-wastewater, closed-loop water circuit,” according to the outlet.
On the Radar
For years, farmers in Hungary’s central Homokhátság region have watched as their crops and soils succumbed to worsening drought, and groundwater reserves and wells ran dry. The situation became so dire that last summer, when the Hungarian meteorological service announced soils had once again reached “critical dryness,” some farmers weighed leaving the region altogether.
But others aren’t going down without a fight. A growing number of “water guardians” are fighting desertification by working with local authorities and thermal spas to redirect spas’ overflow water — usually dumped into canals — onto their lands to create artificial lakes, the Associated Press reports. They hope that these lakes will not only bring moisture back into soils, but create a microclimate that increases local humidity and spurs a greater amount of rainfall.
In Context: Farmers consider abandoning drought-hit region in central Hungary
Wetland Watch
Waters of the United States: Monday, January 5 was the final day to submit public comments to the U.S. EPA and Army Corps of Engineers regarding the agencies’ proposed stripping of protections that would leave millions of acres of wetlands across the country exposed to pollution and development.
In Context: Three Great Lakes States at Greatest Risk as EPA Rolls Back Wetland Protections
