Climate Change to Bring Longer Droughts in Europe: Study

Punishing two-year droughts like the record-breaking one that swept Central Europe from 2018 to 2019 could become much more frequent if the region failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, researchers said Thursday, affecting vast areas of its cultivated land.

Five of the hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the last five years.

This extreme heat was exacerbated by two consecutive summers of drought that affected more than half of Central Europe in 2018 and 2019, reports AFP quoting a study published in Nature Journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers in Germany and the Czech Republic used data from 1766 to conclude that the drought was the largest and most severe dry spell ever recorded.

“The observational record suggests that the ongoing 2018-2019 European drought event is unprecedented in the last 250 years, with substanprolongedtial implications for vegetation health,” the study said.

Researchers then sought to estimate whether the use of global climate change models would make prolonged droughts more frequent in the future.

Under a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise inexorably, researchers predict that the number of extreme two-year droughts will sevenfold increase in Europe in the second half of this century.

“This projection also suggested that drought-affected cropland areas across Central Europe will nearly double,” said co-author Rohini Kumar, of the UFZ-Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, in Leipzig.

That will result in a total of 40 million hectares of planted land affected — equivalent to 60 per cent of all crops in the country.

Since researchers based on modest pollution, the projected two-year drought has decreased by half relative to the worst-case scenario, although the region estimated to be affected by drought has also decreased.

Kumar said this suggests a reduction in emissions could lower the risk of these damaging dry periods.

– The threat to agriculture –

The researcher said that a two-year dry period poses a far greater threat to vegetation than the one-summer droughts of previous years because the land can not recover as quickly as possible.

He said that around a quarter of the Central European region has had bad plant health in the last two years.

“Thus, it is with the utmost urgency that we need to recognise the importance of these persevering consecutive year events, and to develop a holistic framework to model the risk,” he added.

The study defined Central Europe as comprising parts of Germany, France, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic, Belgium, Slovenia, Hungary, and Slovakia.

Over 34% of the total land area in the region is widely used for agricultural purposes, it said.

The Paris climate agreement of 2015 commits nations to cap temperature rises to "well below" 2C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and to strive for a 1.5C limit if at all possible.

With the only 1C of warming so far, the Earth is already buffeted by record-breaking droughts, wildfires and superstorms made more powerful by rising sea levels.

To keep in line with the 1.5C target, the United Nations says global emissions must fall by 7.6 percent every year this decade.