Colombia Faces Water Shortages as El Niño Forces Rationing

Colombia is confronting rising water shortages as the El Niño weather phenomenon (a periodic warming of Pacific Ocean waters that reduces rainfall and raises temperatures across the region) drives up demand while shrinking the rivers and reservoirs that supply entire communities. High temperatures and scarce rainfall have already pushed several Colombian regions toward rationing measures, forcing residents in some areas to seek alternative ways to secure water for daily use.

Authorities and water experts now call on households nationwide to adopt more responsible consumption habits, arguing that small behavioral changes at home can meaningfully reduce the strain on an already stressed supply system. That call matters because a single person consumes an average of 76 to 78 liters of water daily, and a significant share of that use happens through routine activities most people rarely think to adjust, such as washing dishes, showering, or running a washing machine.

Colombia’s current crisis, then, functions less as a distant environmental abstraction and more as an immediate, practical problem that individual households can actually influence through the choices they make every single day. Understanding both where the shortage hits hardest and which specific habits genuinely save water gives Colombians the clearest path toward easing this pressure collectively.

How water shortages are straining supplies across Colombia

La Guajira already shows how severe this shortage can become at the community level, since residents across several sectors there report real difficulty accessing water and have turned to wells and water trucks, known locally as carrotanques, just to meet basic daily needs. Bolivar faces an even broader crisis, with 42 of its 46 municipalities reporting water shortages according to the Departmental Risk Management Office, a proportion that leaves only a handful of towns across the entire department still receiving normal supply.

Santander shows a similarly uneven picture: 11 municipalities currently operate under water rationing, while in Los Santos specifically, 80% of the population has no regular water supply at all and depends entirely on water trucks for its daily needs. Cundinamarca’s situation looks somewhat different but equally serious, since Facatativa began rationing service by sector after its own water sources dropped to critically low levels, a measure local authorities adopted specifically to stretch the remaining supply across as many households as possible.

Medellin, meanwhile, implemented planned water cutoffs specifically as part of its broader strategy for managing El Niño’s effects on the city’s supply, showing that even Colombia’s larger, better-resourced cities cannot fully escape the phenomenon’s reach. Taken together, these five cases show a pattern extending well beyond any single region, since El Niño is straining Colombia’s water infrastructure simultaneously across the Caribbean coast, the eastern mountains, and the country’s second-largest city alike.

Simple habits that can cut household water use

Colombian households can start with dishwashing, an activity that consumes roughly 2,770 liters of water monthly per household, simply by closing the tap while scrubbing dishes with soap and reopening it only when rinsing actually requires running water. Showering offers another significant opportunity, since experts recommend timing showers to last between two and three minutes and capturing the initial cold water that runs while waiting for the temperature to warm, water that households can then reuse for mopping floors or cleaning bathrooms rather than letting it disappear down the drain.

The same simple principle applies to brushing teeth: closing the tap during the actual brushing and opening it only when water becomes genuinely necessary eliminates yet another source of routine waste. Washing machines round out the list of major household water users, consuming around 790 liters monthly, and Colombians can reduce that figure meaningfully by running full loads rather than washing small batches of clothes across multiple cycles. Real results already back up these recommendations: during a recent rationing effort in Medellin’s northeastern zone, utility company EPM reported saving 121 liters per second, surpassing its own goal of 120 liters per second. Facatativa’s experience shows more mixed results, since its awareness campaign aimed to save 50,000 cubic meters of water but ultimately achieved 15,000, a gap that suggests Colombia still has considerable room to strengthen how effectively these conservation messages reach and change everyday household behavior.