Europe Confronts Worst Drought in 500 Years, Officials Say

Europe is expe­ri­enc­ing its worst drought of the past 500 years, accord­ing to the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.

“We haven’t ana­lyzed fully [this year’s drought] because it is still ongo­ing, but based on my expe­ri­ence, I think that this is per­haps even more extreme than 2018,” Andrea Toreti, a senior researcher at the European Drought Observatory, told a con­fer­ence last week.

“Just to give you an idea, the 2018 drought was so extreme that, look­ing back at least the last 500 years, there were no other events sim­i­lar to the drought of 2018, but this year I think it is really worse than 2018,” he added.

Western and cen­tral Europe have recorded vir­tu­ally no rain­fall in the past two months, and the Joint Research Center warned that con­di­tions will likely worsen over the next three months.

Officials at Europe’s lead­ing sci­ence and knowl­edge ser­vice esti­mated that 47 per­cent of the 27-mem­ber bloc is at risk of being impacted by the drought, with farm­ers across four of the con­ti­nen­t’s largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­tries among the most severely affected.

France, Italy, Portugal and Spain – which com­bined to yield 88 per­cent of the European Union’s olive oil pro­duc­tion in the 2021/22 crop year – have felt the impacts of an unusu­ally dry win­ter and spring fol­lowed by sev­eral extreme heat­waves.

In Spain, the world’s largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­try by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin, the coun­try’s reser­voirs are at just 40 per­cent of their nor­mal capac­ity. Officials have responded by putting water restric­tions in place.

In Andalusia, the most fruit­ful olive oil-pro­duc­ing region in the world, the drought is par­tic­u­larly pro­nounced. Local reser­voirs are at just 25 per­cent capac­ity. Underground aquifers and nat­ural bod­ies of sur­face water are also run­ning low.

Olive grow­ers in the region have warned that the har­vest from rain­fed groves will likely be less than 20 per­cent of the aver­age of the pre­vi­ous half-decade. Yields from irri­gated groves are also expected to fall by more than 50 per­cent.

The Association of Young Farmers and Ranchers (Asaja) pre­dicts that Spain will pro­duce 1 mil­lion tons of olive oil in the 2022/23 crop year, the low­est total since 2013/14.

A recently-pub­lished study in Nature Geoscience found that parts of Spain are the dri­est that they have been in more than 1,000 years.

The drought has been just as unfor­giv­ing on the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula in Portugal. Rainfall in Europe’s fourth-largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­try has also been his­tor­i­cally sparse.

According to the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA), Portugal has received half of the rain­fall it nor­mally does dur­ing a hydro­log­i­cal year, which runs from October to September.

Overall, the 2021/22 hydro­log­i­cal year is on pace to be the sec­ond dri­est since records began in 1931, with just 419 mil­lime­ters of rain falling to date. Only 2004/05 was drier.

Gonçalo Almeida Simões, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Alentejo Olive Oil Association, told local media that olive grow­ers across the coun­try were feel­ing the effect of the drought.

Rainfed groves – which rep­re­sent 30 per­cent of all Portuguese olive groves – were being hit the hard­est by the drought and expect to see sig­nif­i­cant pro­duc­tion declines.

On the other hand, irri­gated groves are still being sup­plied with ade­quate amounts of water and are likely to see more minor pro­duc­tion decreases.

As a result, offi­cials in the north­ern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes have pledged to invest more money in irri­ga­tion infra­struc­ture to help pro­duc­ers deal with severe water deficits.

On the other side of Spain, France is also fac­ing its ​“most severe” drought on record.

Insufficient pre­cip­i­ta­tion across the coun­try – specif­i­cally in the moun­tain­ous south­east where snow­fall at the begin­ning of the year melts dur­ing the sum­mer to replen­ish rivers and reser­voirs – com­bined with scorch­ing heat­waves, which have led to evap­o­ra­tion from those unre­plen­ished rivers and reser­voirs, have caused the gov­ern­ment to put water restric­tions in place across the coun­try.

Less than 1 cen­time­ter of rain fell on aver­age across France in July, which has resulted in short­ages of drink­ing water and the pos­si­bil­ity of dis­rup­tions at some of the coun­try’s nuclear power plants.

Farmers across the south of the coun­try have been told to reduce the amount of water they are using to irri­gate their crops and, when they do, to irri­gate at night to avoid evap­o­ra­tion.

In the south­ern region of Occitaine, an olive farmer in Gard told local media that the drought and heat­waves have des­ic­cated his olives. Bruno Nicolas said he even tried to dig a well in an attempt to reach the aquifer but could not afford to dig deep enough to reach it.

Overall, pro­duc­ers in France expect to see olive oil-pro­duc­tion fall by up to 50 per­cent as a result of the drought.

Meanwhile, drought and poor infra­struc­ture have led Italy’s agri­cul­ture min­is­ter to warn par­lia­ment that one-third of the coun­try’s agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion is at risk of fail­ing.

The his­tor­i­cally low water lev­els of Lake Garda and the Po River have snatched most of the inter­na­tional head­lines, but drought in the south­ern Italian regions of Puglia, Calabria and Sicily are expected to result in olive oil pro­duc­tion falling by one-third.

However, the drought in Puglia has had some very dif­fer­ent con­se­quences from the rest of Europe. The increas­ingly arid cli­mate in Italy’s largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing region has dried out the soil and low­ered its abil­ity to retain water.

Heavy rain­fall expe­ri­enced by the region ear­lier in the week resulted in land­slides and flood­ing, which has caused an esti­mated €200 mil­lion of dam­age to olive groves and other crops.

Experts expect these severe sum­mer squalls to become increas­ingly fre­quent as the region receives its annual rain­fall in more con­cen­trated peri­ods of time.

Coldiretti, a farm­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion, said south­ern Italy needs to invest in infra­struc­ture to cap­ture and save this rain­wa­ter while pre­vent­ing it from dam­ag­ing crops and rural infra­struc­ture.

“Faced with the trop­i­cal­iza­tion of the cli­mate, it is nec­es­sary to reduce soil con­sump­tion and orga­nize to col­lect water in the wettest peri­ods to make it avail­able in times of dif­fi­culty,” Coldiretti wrote in a state­ment.

“This is why main­te­nance, sav­ing, recov­ery and recy­cling of water are nec­es­sary with infra­struc­tural works, strength­en­ing the net­work of reser­voirs in the region, cre­at­ing basins and also using the for­mer quar­ries to col­lect rain­wa­ter in order to man­age its use when it is needed,” the asso­ci­a­tion con­cluded.

• Phys.org
• The Portugal News
• Euronews