Countries With No Rivers

Around 20 countries have no permanent rivers: no natural watercourse that flows year-round. They fall into two groups — arid states where any channel is a dry wadi for most of the year, and micro-states and coral islands too small or too flat for a river to form.

The desert countries

• Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. The peninsula has wadis that flow briefly after rain but no perennial river anywhere.
• Libya has no permanent river; its "Great Man-Made River" is a pipeline network drawing fossil groundwater from beneath the Sahara.
• Djibouti and, depending on the definition, parts of the Horn are effectively riverless in the dry season.

The small islands and micro-states

• Coral and low limestone islands: the Maldives, the Bahamas, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, Tonga, Bahrain, Malta. Rain soaks straight through porous rock into a freshwater lens rather than running off.
• Tiny European states: Vatican City and Monaco have no river of their own (the Tiber flows past Rome but not through Vatican territory).

How riverless countries get their water

Three main ways. Desalination: the Gulf states run some of the largest desalination plants on Earth, and Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE get most of their drinking water from the sea. Fossil groundwater: Libya and Saudi Arabia pump water from aquifers that filled during wetter ages thousands of years ago and are not being replenished. Rainwater capture and imports: small islands rely on tanks, reservoirs and, increasingly, shipped or piped supply.

The opposite extreme

For contrast, Bangladesh has more than 700 rivers, Russia has over 100,000 watercourses feeding the Arctic and Caspian, and Canada holds an estimated 20% of the world's fresh surface water. The Amazon alone discharges more water than the next seven largest rivers combined.