Drought Expected to Hit Europe Again, Scientists Warn

After a win­ter of below-aver­age pre­cip­i­ta­tion, cli­mate sci­en­tists have warned that drought might again beset Europe this sum­mer.

In the sum­mer of 2022, the continent’s dri­est of the past 500 years, con­sec­u­tive and pro­longed heat­waves and drought dom­i­nated south­ern and south­west­ern European, severely impact­ing crops.

Consequently, olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­tries, includ­ing Spain, Portugal, France and Italy, saw a sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tion in their 2022/23 olive oil yields.

However, the drought’s effects are not lim­ited to the Mediterranean basin: mild win­ter weather, which brought low amounts of rain and snow, has exac­er­bated Europe’s water deficit prob­lem, with vast areas becom­ing drier than usual.

“Honestly, all over cen­tral Europe, this issue, it’s a wide­spread prob­lem,” said Carmelo Cammalleri of the Polytechnic University of Milan, refer­ring to European water scarcity.

According to a study by the Graz University of Technology in Austria, Europe has been in a drought since 2018, with its water sta­tus char­ac­ter­ized as ​“very pre­car­i­ous.”

Scientists have seri­ously ques­tioned the abil­ity of Europe’s water reser­voirs to replen­ish before sum­mer.

“Clearly, in some parts of Europe, the lack of pre­cip­i­ta­tion and the cur­rent deficit is such that it won’t be easy for water lev­els to recover before the start of the sum­mer,” said Andrea Toreti, a senior sci­en­tist at the European Drought Observatory.

“What is unusual is the recur­rence of these [drought] events because we already expe­ri­enced a severe to extreme drought a year ago and another one in 2018,” he added.

According to Burak Bulut, a French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) researcher, last summer’s drought had set in on Europe much ear­lier.

“We looked at water bal­ance anom­alies from December 2021 to August 2022,” Bulut told Olive Oil Times. ​“Based on both our research and obser­va­tions from other sources, it is evi­dent that the drought con­di­tions expe­ri­enced dur­ing the sum­mer of 2022 actu­ally began in the win­ter of 2021.”

Bulut noted that the dry period is con­tin­u­ing in Europe and much of the world, adding that any aver­age pre­cip­i­ta­tion should not be con­sid­ered a return to a sem­blance of nor­mal­ity.

“As we are cur­rently at the end of March and the drought con­di­tions are still present, it is accu­rate to state that the dry period is ongo­ing,” he said. ​“In real­ity, it appears that we are expe­ri­enc­ing a drought not only within Europe but in most parts of the globe.”

“It is impor­tant to note that even when pre­cip­i­ta­tion lev­els are near the long-term aver­age, the impacts of drought are becom­ing more evi­dent due to ris­ing tem­per­a­tures and the result­ing increase in evap­o­ra­tion and tran­spi­ra­tion,” Bulut added.

Bulut pre­dicts another dry sum­mer for Europe, dri­ven by higher-than-usual tem­per­a­tures. He also iden­ti­fied an antic­i­pated shift in the drought effects from the south­west to the south­east of the Mediterranean region.

“Given that much of Europe expe­ri­enced below-aver­age pre­cip­i­ta­tion lev­els dur­ing the recent win­ter, it is rea­son­able to assume that drought con­di­tions will per­sist dur­ing the upcom­ing sum­mer months,” he said.

“Based on trend stud­ies, it has been deter­mined that we are cur­rently expe­ri­enc­ing a three-month period (March to May) of higher tem­per­a­tures and lower pre­cip­i­ta­tion lev­els, par­tic­u­larly in south­east Europe and the Mediterranean region,” Bulut added.

“As a result of these find­ings, it is antic­i­pated that the sum­mer sea­son will be char­ac­ter­ized by above-aver­age tem­per­a­tures and drier con­di­tions in these regions,” he con­tin­ued.

Bulut said the impacts of drought are expected to per­sist, even if spring rains man­age to mit­i­gate some of the water deficit in cer­tain areas.

By com­par­ing drought peri­ods in Europe from 1836 to 2021, the researchers at CNRS have also iden­ti­fied the drought of 2022 as being par­tially anthro­pogenic.

“Climate change linked to human activ­i­ties con­tributes to the occur­rence of pro­longed drought episodes like the one that affected Western Europe and the Mediterranean region in 2022,” the researchers wrote.

“The results under­score the impor­tance of con­tin­u­ing efforts to reduce green­house gas emis­sions and mit­i­gate the effects of cli­mate change,” they added.

Meanwhile, António Guterres, the sec­re­tary-gen­eral of the United Nations, urged polit­i­cal lead­ers world­wide to inten­sify their efforts to pre­serve global water resources.

“All of humanity’s hopes for the future depend, in some way, on chart­ing a new course to man­age and con­serve water sus­tain­ably,” Guterres said at the United Nations 2023 Water Conference held in New York last month, the first global water con­ven­tion in almost 50 years.

“It needs to be at the cen­ter of the polit­i­cal agenda,” he con­cluded.

• The Guardian
• Wired
• French National Center for Scientific Research