Extreme heat is drying Europe out, say scientists

By the Climate Centre

Climate change is worsening the drought across Europe as natural water evaporates even as regional rainfall trends remain mixed, according to new research by World Weather Attribution (WWA) released yesterday.

“With the summer far from over, relentless heatwaves and dry conditions have already triggered agricultural losses, dangerous wildfires, and historically low river levels,” a WWA press release said.

Media reports say France may have its smallest maize crop in 50 years while Romania has restricted ​irrigation, the Netherlands has declared ⁠a water shortage, seven Greek islands have declared emergencies, and even rainy Ireland has banned domestic hosepipes.

“The drying of major rivers is disrupting shipping and threatening energy production,” WWA added.

‘The atmosphere sucks moisture
out of rivers, lakes, reservoirs, soil’

Agricultural droughts in the soil of Western Europe have become five times more likely due to climate change and in Eastern Europe, where dry conditions have persisted for six months, they are at least ten times more likely.

Dominik Schumacher of the Swiss Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, who contributed to the WWA study, said yesterday: “Despite more wintertime rainfall across most of Europe, we now see an enhanced tendency for unusual soil drying already in spring, before summer has even begun.

“That is our own doing: as temperatures climb, the atmosphere’s thirst increases quickly, sucking moisture out of rivers, lakes, reservoirs and the soil.

“This fundamentally changes how European droughts form: less and less through missing rain and more and more through warmer air that prevents the rain from staying in the ground.”

Europe has seen three distinct heatwaves this summer, fuelling ‌wildfires that the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre said Wednesday are above the average of the last 20 years in terms of the area burnt and only slightly below 2025 – the worst year on record.

More than 10,000 people were successfully evacuated earlier in the week in south-west France as a ferocious wildfire burnt through at least 2,400 hectares of land west of Bordeaux, officials said; there were no reports of deaths or injuries.

In central Spain, firefighters, emergency personnel and military units were on the ground as the authorities monitored fires in Guadalajara, Toledo, Ciudad Real and Albacete.

London’s parched Greenwich Park in August last year at the end of a long summer heatwave, with bleached grass and many trees already losing their leaves and younger ones looking seriously stressed. This scene and many others like it or worse have been repeated this year. (File photo: Alisdare Hickson via P2R)