Climate change has intensified Europe's risk of drought, scientists say
Human-caused climate change has exacerbated the European drought, with extreme heat—not lack of rain—being the primary driver, according to a new study.
An international team of scientists said Thursday that human-induced climate change has intensified a drought across Europe, with extreme heat—rather than low rainfall—driving the exceptionally dry conditions. The continent is gripped by a major drought, with countries from France to Romania facing parched rivers, water restrictions, and devastating wildfires after a historic heatwave in June.
A new study by the World Weather Attribution group found that today's hotter climate has accelerated moisture loss from Europe's soils, lakes, and rivers, increasing the likelihood of bone-dry conditions. While much of Europe received below-average spring rainfall, it was climate-driven heat that made the drought "more severe," said co-author Mariam Zachariah from Imperial College London.
"Overall, our results show that this drought is not primarily a story of low rainfalls but of a warmer atmosphere that is causing more moisture deficits on the land," Zachariah told reporters. "This means that even in regions where the rainfall has changed little or is projected to increase seasonally, drought risk continues to rise." Scientists explain that a warmer atmosphere can hold about 7% more water vapor for every 1°C rise in temperature. The planet has warmed about 1.4°C since 1850–1900, primarily due to burning coal, oil, and gas.
'Thirsty' atmosphere
Scientists say climate change is making destructive events such as droughts, floods, and heatwaves more frequent and intense, and that Europe is the world's fastest-warming continent. Last month was the hottest June ever recorded in western Europe, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, with a brutal heatwave causing thousands of excess deaths.
Study co-author Dominik Schumacher from ETH Zurich told journalists that the heat was so intense that even regions with a relatively wet winter were baked dry just months later. "If you have increasingly hot air, it will soak the soils dry. And then it gets even hotter, and the soils get even drier," he said, adding that this rapid drying also primed the land for wildfires.
For the study, scientists from Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom used weather data and computer models to compare a drought in today's hotter world with a climate that was 1.4°C cooler. They found that extremely dry soils were five times more likely today in western Europe than in a world without climate change, and 11 times more likely in eastern Europe. The exceptionally high levels of evaporative demand—the atmosphere's potential to draw moisture from soils and plants—observed between April and June in western Europe were about 80 times more likely. "Because the atmosphere is now thirstier, the same rainfall deficit that might not have caused a drought in the pre-industrial climate can now lead to a more severe event," said Zachariah.
