The 13th World Meteorological Congress noted that by 2025 two thirds of the population will experience a shortage of fresh water.
Even in Russia, despite the whole vast water resources, many agricultural regions are in the area of risky agriculture. According to the Ministry of Agriculture information, more than 60% of the agricultural area of Russia is considered as areas with low humidity.
Russian technology is an artificial increase of precipitation based on the results of long-term experiments in the Volga region, Moldova and Cuba and the development and production activities over large areas in the Stavropol Territory, Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan (1986-1993 years), Yakutia (1995 — 2005 years).
Application of this technology allows to increase rainfall in 1.5-2.0 times and add about 10-30% seasonal amount of precipitation over large areas.
The scientific basis of artificial increase of precipitation is a hypothesis about the dependence of the unstable state of clouds and cloud systems on the effects of external disturbances. Using the phase instability in supercooled clouds the artificial crystallization zones arise, which become the centers of formation of droplets and lead to increased amounts of precipitation falling from clouds.
The most promising clouds for weather modification in summer period are the clusters of convective clouds, which occupy the area up to 400 — 600 km².
In winter season the most promising are the extensive system of nimbostratus clouds of frontal origin.
The high efficiency of the Russian technology of precipitation enhancement is achieved by identifying of a specific group of clouds in each region, seeding those leads to a positive effect, and application of specially designed technical means providing injection of the reagent in a certain part of the cloud.
The technology is based on the aircraft method of cloud seeding by ice-forming reagents.
The seeding of clouds reached a certain stage of its development, with the optimal concentration of particles of ice-forming aerosols leads to an increase in cloud thickness, its horizontal dimensions, lifetime and, consequently, to increase of precipitation from these clouds.
Russian technology and the technological means to carry out work on the artificial increase of precipitation have been successfully used in 1991-1997 in winter precipitation enhancement project in the Syrian Arab Republic. As a result of these works an average of 3  cubic kilometers additional water were achieved over the whole territory of Syria during winter season (December — March). The similar results were obtained in the experimental-production work on the artificial increase of precipitation in Iran (1999 to 2001) and demonstration project in Portugal (1999).
According to evaluation of experts, the cost of one cubic meter of additional water got during the work on artificial increase of precipitation in different projects is 0.1 — 0.5 €.