![]() ![]() When the rains are hard, they’re less useful for refilling reservoirs and watering the fields, which need gentler rain.” “We’ve noticed the droughts in the south of Spain are lasting longer and that, when the rains come, they’re shorter but more intense,” he said. The worst affected areas were the northern third of the country and parts of Andalucía and the south of Castilla-La Mancha, he said.Īsked about the role of global heating, Del Campo said that while drought had always been a natural phenomenon because of Spain’s geographical location, a change had been seen over recent decades. Rubén del Campo, a spokesperson for the state meteorological agency Aemet, said the situation showed no sign of improving over the coming months. ![]() Among the government’s plans are modernising agricultural irrigation, which represents up to 80% of consumption in summer, boosting wastewater recycling, and reducing loss due to leakage.Īll of Spain has been in drought since January 2022, but water supplies in Catalonia have fallen so low that authorities this week introduced laws including a 40% reduction in water used for agriculture, a 15% reduction for industrial uses, and a cut in the average daily supply per inhabitant from 250 litres to 230 litres. ![]() “All of us are going to have to be careful,” he said. People in four southern départements have been barred from filling swimming pools or washing their cars, while farmers must cut their water consumption by up to half.Įchoing the terms he used to describe the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, called this week for a “sobriety plan” to save water and warned the “time of abundance” had come to an end. “The situation is more serious than this time last year,” Béchu said. The minister for ecological transition, Christophe Béchu, warned that France would have to cope with up to 40% less water in coming years, adding that the country was already on a “state of alert” and restrictions in some areas were fully justified. Local authorities in all seven of the country’s major river basins have been ordered to start enforcing water restrictions as the government works on a crisis plan to tackle a shortage that it has said will inevitable lead to “water scarcity problems” this year. Nine of the past 12 months had seen rainfall up to 85% below the norm, he told France Info news.įrance’s CNRS scientific research centre said that by comparing droughts before 1945 and since 1945 it had established that last summer’s drought was caused by anthropogenic climate change and this winter’s showed “the same characteristics”. Simon Mitelberger, a climatologist, said about 75% less rain had fallen across France last month than usual for February, continuing a year-long trend. Experts have said the coming months will be crucial.Ī map of current droughts in Europe from the EU’s Copernicus programme shows alerts for low rainfall or soil moisture in areas of northern and southern Spain, northern Italy and southern Germany, with almost all of France affected.įrance recently recorded 32 days without significant rainfall, the longest period since records began in 1959, and the state forecaster Météo-France has said little or no precipitation of note is expected until at least the end of the month. “Clearly, in some parts of Europe, the lack of precipitation and the current deficit is such that it won’t be easy for water levels to recover before the start of the summer,” Toreti told Euronews. The World Weather Attribution service said last year northern hemisphere drought was at least 20 times more likely because of human-caused climate change, warning that such extreme periods would become increasingly common with global heating.Īndrea Toreti, a senior scientist at the European Drought Observatory, said: “What is unusual is the recurrence of these events, because we already experienced a severe to extreme drought a year ago, and another one in 2018. ![]() We are actually getting problems with the water supply here. Torsten Mayer-Gürr, one of the researchers, said: “I would never have imagined that water would be a problem here in Europe, especially in Germany or Austria. A study published in January by Graz University of Technology in Austria, whose scientists used satellite data to analyse groundwater reserves, concluded that Europe has been in drought since 2018 and its water situation was now “very precarious”. ![]()
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