Global loss of lake water storage

Drying trends are prevalent worldwide Lakes sustain a wide variety of ecosystems and provide vital water for agriculture, hydropower, and direct human consumption. Often characterized as “sentinels of climate change” ( 1 ), lakes integrate multiple basin-scale climatic processes including precipitation, runoff, and evapotranspiration. The amount of water stored in lakes therefore reflects both short- and long-term climate fluctuations. However, attributing changes in lake water storage to climate is complex, because direct human activities such as reservoir management, water withdrawals, and land-use change also affect lake water storage. On page 743 of this issue, Yao et al. ( 2 ) present a dataset of decadal-scale trends in lake water storage from 1992 to 2020 and attribute them to human activities and climatic patterns.