The devastating drought in Europe has now spread to nearly two-thirds of the continent, in what European officials say is probably the worst drought in 500 years.
The findings came with the publication through the European Commission’s Global Drought Observatory of a new report on situations this week. The commission found that 47 percent of the continent is suffering from drought warnings, meaning there is a shortage of rain and the soil is drying up. while 17% of the continent is under drought alert, which means that in addition to soil and rainfall problems, plants are exhibiting symptoms of stress.
“The severe drought that has affected many parts of Europe since the birth of the year has spread further and worsened at the beginning of August,” the report, which includes data from the first 10 days of August, said in its executive summary. The dry situations are related to a significant and persistent lack of rain combined with a series of heat waves that are born in May. “
Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Romania, Hungary, northern Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova, Ireland and the United Kingdom are in increasingly damaging conditions, according to the report, while the rest of Europe, affected by very dry conditions, maintains stability. England has just experienced its driest July since 1935.
Few regions — southern Czech Republic, northern Austria and small regions of central France — have noticed a recovery, the report says.
Brutal heat waves and the drought era have wreaked visual havoc across the continent.
The degrees of the river have become so low that artifacts have emerged from its depths. In June, the water level on Italy’s largest river, the Po, has become so low that a 164-year-old barge wearing World War II wood sank in 1943 and became visible. Dozens of sunken ships have also sprung up along Europe’s longest river, the Danube, which stretches from southwestern Germany to the Black Sea in eastern Romania.
Forest chimneys also spread throughout the county, burning crops and forcing many other people to flee their homes. Earlier this month, a devastating chimney devastated the Bordeaux wine region and reduced a strip of land to ashes. Approximately 10,000 more people had to be evacuated in this region alone. Spain and Portugal have fought their own fires, with thousands of firefighters deployed to assist the burns.
The situations led the European Commission to state that “the existing drought in Europe turns out to be the worst in at least 500 years”, adding that “the effects of time substitution are increasingly noticeable every year”.
The existing crisis has wreaked havoc on several sectors in Europe, adding energy and agriculture. Reduced water availability has affected hydropower production and has had a significant impact on power plant cooling systems, the report says, as water and heat stress has increased. “significantly reduced” summer crop yields.
Corn, soybean and sunflower grains were the hardest hit. Compared to the 5-year average, yields of those crops fell 16Array, 15 and 12Array respectively, according to the report.
A little rain in mid-August would possibly have helped some spaces cope with their drought conditions, however, for many spaces, the storms that hit only increased damage and losses, minimizing the benefits of rain.
And according to the report, it’s not over.
The researchers expect situations to be “warmer and drier than usual” in the western Euro-Mediterranean region until at least November. In some parts of the Iberian Peninsula, drier-than-normal situations are expected for at least 3 months according to bueno, the report warns.