The crunch of leaves underfoot is usually associated with autumn. But this year, it was the soundtrack to summer strolls across Europe, as maximum temperature records fell and the continent suffered its .
, with many shedding leaves to conserve water and energy.
Their bare branches were one of the most visible signs of a landscape in crisis during the long hot summer as rivers, reservoirs and underwater aquifers ran dry.
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“It was very clear from just looking around the landscape that we were in a very serious situation,” says at the University of Reading, UK.
The drought had been building for months after a dry winter and spring, but it was turbocharged by a series of fierce heatwaves over the summer, says at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. It was a “perfect storm of conditions”, he says.
The crisis exposed the fragility of Europe’s energy system, already weakened by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In France, nuclear power plants were forced to curtail their output as low river flows meant there wasn’t enough water to cool their reactors. Water levels on the Rhine river dropped so far that ships loaded with commodities in Germany and the Netherlands, including coal and petrol, were unable to travel. Hydropower generation in Norway slowed, prompting the government to cut power exports.
Farmers saw crops wither. In Europe, yields of maize, soya beans and sunflower seeds were predicted to fall by between 12 and 16 per cent in 2022.
This was a crisis caused in large part by climate change, says , who is also at the University of Reading. “Warming due to human-caused climate change made this event much more extreme,” he says. Climate attribution studies suggest that .
Parts of Africa, China and the US were also hit by drought, with China having the worst heatwave ever recorded anywhere.
However, that missing rainfall ends up somewhere, says at the Pacific Institute in California. This year’s devastating floods in countries including Australia and Pakistan are the “flip side” of the droughts, he says.
“The droughts and the extreme floods that we are seeing are tied together, are part and parcel of the broader challenge of climate change,” says Gleick.
In the wake of a drought, it is critical that nature gets time to recover. But for Europe, this was the second severe drought in four years. “My grass has already recovered from this summer… but if I had a tree that survived it, that would take 10 years or more to get back to a normal state,” says at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
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