Every evening, Abdullah Achakzai, director of the Environmental Volunteer Network (EVN), encounters the same grim reality as he returns home from work in Kabul. Queues of people, mostly children, wait for hours to collect water from private tankers. With piped water in short supply, many Afghans rely on these tankers to meet basic household needs.
In recent years, the number of people waiting in line has grown steadily, says Achakzai. “The situation is worse compared to last year,” he told Dialogue Earth. “We anticipate the coming years will be even more critical, with underground water levels continuing to decline.”
Most Afghan households rely on personal wells for drinking, cooking and agriculture. According to an August 2024 report by the National Statistics Directorate, there are approximately 310,000 drilled wells across the country. But Achakzai explains that an EVN survey conducted in July shared with Dialogue Earth found that the drought has made these wells less reliable. “Wells drilled in previous years to a depth of 200m are now running dry, forcing many residents, particularly those in high-rise buildings, to drill wells as deep as 300m or more to access water,” he said.
However, Achakzai warned that as “underground water levels are rapidly decreasing” even these deep wells are unlikely to offer a long-term solution. A 2023 UN report confirmed that “49% of boreholes assessed in Kabul Province are dry, and the remaining boreholes are functioning at only 60% efficiency.”
Increasing climate shocks
“Climate change is disrupting weather patterns [in unprecedented ways],” said Mohammad Daud Hamidi, an Afghan water expert, who has spent years studying the country’s water insecurity. Afghanistan, already battered by conflict and instability, has experienced three consecutive years of severe drought since 2021.
Afghanistan’s water supply largely depends on the seasonal snow melt from its mountains, which feeds into major rivers. “However, changes in snowfall patterns are altering surface water availability leading to increased reliance on groundwater resources, for both domestic use and irrigation,” Hamidi said. “These resources are being depleted faster than they can be replenished.”
In rural Afghanistan, the effects of the drought are particularly pronounced, leading to increased migration to cities, increasing pressure on urban water supplies. Industrial activities are also adding pressure. Hamidi singled out the mining industry, where there has been a “recent proliferation of contracts without proper environmental impact assessments.”
Yet droughts are not the only climate-related disaster Afghanistan faces. They are often followed by flash floods. Since May, over 250 people have died and nearly 120,000 have been affected by flash floods in northern and eastern Afghanistan, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA].
“With an increase in temperature [due to climate change], air can retain more water,” explained Najibullah Sadid, an Afghan water management expert at the University of Stuttgart. “Even a degree of increase in air temperature, allows air to retain 7% more water, forming heavier clouds, which in turn can cause thunderstorms, localised heavy rains and floods,” he said. Many of Afghanistan’s worst floods in recent years, he noted, occurred during high-temperature periods, including the 2022 floods in Khoshi, Logar and the 2020 floods in Charikar, Parwan, which claimed over 100 lives.
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