NGO said that the residents of the Afghan capital, which number about 7 million people, are facing an existential water crisis that the world needs to treat urgently, while experts warned that Kabul may become the first modern city to lose the entire water within a few years.
According to Report Signed by Mercy Corp, the water levels inside the groundwater layers in Kabul have decreased by up to 30 meters over the past decade due to rapid urban expansion and climate change.
The report emphasized that the water crisis in a cable is close to a critical turning point, as the extraction of groundwater greatly exceeds natural nutrition, and about half of the city wells, which is the main source of drinking water for the residents of Kabul has already dried up.
Without urgent and coordinated investment, Kabul risks the first modern capital to be drought, according to the report.
Water extraction is currently exceeding 44 million cubic meters annually. If these trends continue, all groundwater layers in a cable will dry by 2030, which poses an existential threat to the city’s 7 million people.
“It is necessary to better document this crisis, and to attract the attention of the international community to the need to address it.”
He added that “the water interruption means the migration of people from their societies, and therefore the default of the international community in meeting the needs of Afghanistan water will only lead to more migration and more suffering for the Afghan people.”
The Benjshir River pipeline is one of the projects that, if completed, would reduce the excessive dependence of the city on groundwater, and supply two million people with drinking water.
The stages of the design of this project were completed in late 2024, and it is awaiting the approval of the budget, as the government seeks to attract additional investors to complement its cost of $ 170 million.
The absence of governance and financing
And throw Report Light on water pollution as a widespread challenge, about 80% of the groundwater in a cable is unsafe, with high levels of wastewater, salinity and arsenic.
Obtaining water has also become a daily suffering for the residents of Kabul, as some families spend up to 30% of their income on the water, and more than two -thirds of them are burdened with water -related debts.
Some private companies use the crisis by digging new wells and extracting large quantities of public groundwater, then selling them again to the city’s residents at exaggerated prices.
“We were paying 500 Afghan (about 7 dollars) every 10 days to fill our packages of water tanks. Now, we cost us the same amount of water a thousand Afghan ($ 14),” she said, a teacher, a teacher who lives in the Khair Keel neighborhood, told the British newspaper Guardian.
The growth of Kabul residents 7 times, from less than a million people in 2001, led to a fundamental change in water demand. The absence of central governance and organization also led to the continuation of the problem for decades.
In early 2025, the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Coordination announced that its partners received only 8.4 million dollars out of $ 264 million required to implement the planned water and sanitation programs in Afghanistan.
An additional amount of 3 billion dollars has been overwhelmed by international water and sanitation financing since the return Taliban movement To power in August 2021. The crisis exacerbated the last US move by reducing more than 80% of the USAD Funding Agency (USAID).
Curry warned that “everything depends on aid. We can spend millions of dollars on temporary solutions to the water problem and say that we have treated the need, but this need will continue until a better investment for long -term solutions is available. Here the shortcomings lie in the position of foreign governments because of political dynamics.”