We have heard more and more in recent decades about water shortages and unclean water in places where we wouldn’t expect those sorts of issues to arise.

Now, for the first time in modern history, a capital city is on the verge of having its water resources run completely dry.

In Kabul, Afghanistan, it’s getting more difficult – and more expensive – for families to fill their water buckets every single day. It comes into town every morning in tankers, and families rush to fill their buckets and cans before it runs out.

One resident, called Raheela, says they “don’t have access to drinking water at all. Water shortage is a huge problem affecting our daily life.”

Estimates from Mercy Corps and UNICEF predict the city could run out of groundwater completely as soon as 2030, and that event could lead to an economic collapse. It’s being exacerbated by population growth, the climate crisis, and overuse.

Families are trying to supplement dwindling supplies with rainwater, but that’s unreliable in the best of times.

“We are deeply concerned,” Raheela admits to CNN. “We hope for more rain, but if things get worse, I don’t know how we’ll survive.”

Kabul relies entirely on groundwater that is replenished by runoff from glacier melt, but the amount of available water continues to drop. The city is using far more groundwater than the mountains can replenish in any given year, and the mismatch is draining resources on both a personal and governmental level.

Some families, like 28yo Ahmad Yasin’s, have dug deeper wells in search of more water. In the meantime, they wait in longer and longer lines, and told CNN this is causing more problems for him and his family.

That was holding us back from our work and was affecting our income.”

This is the reasons for the deeper wells, and even though they did find water at 120 meters deep, it’s not safe to drink.

“Since we spent all our money on the well, we cannot afford to buy a water filter or purified water. Hence, we boil the well water for extended periods of time, let it cool and then drink it.”

Mercy Corps confirms that up to 80% of Kabul’s groundwater is contaminated due to industrial and private waste pollution. People in Kabul get sick all the time from drinking water that has been contaminated before being distributed.

Najibullah Sadid, a water resource management researcher, told CNN that Kabul is being hit particularly hard by climate change as well.

“We are getting more and more rain, but less and less snow. That’s impacting a city which has less infrastructure to regulate the flash floods…Snow was helping us, but now we have less, and that’s harming us in terms of groundwater recharge.”

People without resources are depending on private companies or charitable donations to have enough water to drink, and residents are spending a significant amount of their monthly income on a basic necessity for life.
It’s beginning to affect the future of a new generation as well, a Mercy Corps representative tells CNN.

“The hours that children should be spending in school, they are now basically spending on fetching water for their families. These harmful coping strategies further deepen the cycle of poverty and vulnerability for women and children.”

Women are at risk, too, due to the fact that they sometimes have to choose between following the Taliban rule of not going outside unescorted by a male guardian and fetching necessary water.

Indeed, politics are also contributing to the crisis. After the Taliban took over in 2021, development and security assistance to the country froze, and humanitarian aid hasn’t been able to fill all of the gaps. This has worsened with the US’s current administration’s decision to halt foreign aid altogether.

In 2025, Afghanistan has received only $8 million of the $264 million required for water and sanitation in Kabul and beyond.

Mercy Corps says the “dangerous mix” of “collapsing local systems, frozen funding, and growing regional friction” is creating a crisis that will be hard to recover from.

Families are going to have to move in order to have access to water.

And that is likely to create a whole new host of problems – and not just in Afghanistan.

There are no easy answers to problems like this one, but it’s clear the world is going to have to work together to come up with workable solutions.

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