Italy’s worst drought in decades has reduced Lake Garda, the country’s largest, to near its lowest level ever recorded and warming the water to temperatures that approach the average in the Caribbean Sea.
Northern Italy has not seen significant rainfall for months, and snowfall this year was down 70 percent, drying up vital waterways such as the Po River, which flows across Italy’s agricultural and industrial heartland.
Many European countries, including Spain, Germany, Portugal, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, are enduring droughts this summer that have hurt farmers and shippers and promoted authorities to restrict water use.
Successive heatwaves have also renewed the focus on climate change risks for Europe.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre warned this week that drought conditions will get worse and potentially affect 47 percent of the continent.
Andrea Toreti, a senior researcher at the European Drought Observatory, said a drought in 2018 was so extreme that there were no similar events in the last 500 years, “but this year, I think, it is really worse”.
For the next three months, “we see still a very high risk of dry conditions over Western and Central Europe, as well as the UK”, Toreti said.
Current conditions result from long periods of dry weather caused by changes in world weather systems, said meteorologist Peter Hoffmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin.
“It’s just that in summer we feel it the most,” he said. “But actually the drought builds up across the year.”
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Climate change has lessened temperature differences between regions, sapping the forces that drive the jet stream, which normally brings wet Atlantic weather to Europe, he said.
A weaker or unstable jet stream can bring unusually hot air to Europe from North Africa, leading to prolonged periods of heat. The reverse is also true when a polar vortex of cold air from the Arctic can cause freezing conditions far south of where it would normally reach.
Hoffmann said observations in recent years have all been at the upper end of what existing climate models predicted.
The parched condition of the Po, Italy’s longest river, has already caused billions of euros in losses to farmers who normally rely on it to irrigate fields and rice paddies.
To compensate, authorities allowed more water from Lake Garda to flow out to local rivers – 70 cubic metres (2,472 cubic feet) of water per second. But in late July, they reduced the amount to protect the lake and the financially important tourism tied to it.
France has also been hit this summer by a historic drought that has forced water use restrictions nationwide, as well as a series of heatwaves that experts say are being driven by climate change.
Fires in France in 2022 have ravaged an area three times the annual average over the past 10 years, with blazes active in the Alpine Jura, Isere and Ardeche regions.
Portugal’s civil protection agency said it had brought a wildfire which has ravaged 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) under control in the UNESCO-designated Serra da Estrela natural park.
In the German capital, Berlin, firefighters were called out to a forest fire in the forested area of the city called Grunewald. About 4,000 square metres of forest floor had burned, a fire brigade spokesperson said that the forest floor was so dry it was not easy to extinguish the fire, requiring firefighters to dig up the embers with tools.
