Fear of Summer: How European Countries Suffer from Winter Droughts – Knowledge

In Italy it has rained again and again in the past few days. In the capital Rome, the Tiber is well filled. Also in Venice, where gondolas were still dry in February, resulting in spectacular images, ships have water under the keel again: This could give the impression that the news about water shortages and the threat of drought in northern Italy were alarmist. Unfortunately they weren’t. In Venice, the whole thing is more of a tidal issue, albeit an unusually violent one, but inland the lack of water is already blatant, in March, and the water levels are sometimes at August levels.

Anyone who crosses the Po, the great water artery of the north, sees a clearly emaciated river with wide banks, and even the well-known lakes in northern Italy are visibly affected. The islet of San Biagio near Manerba del Garda is impressive and can be reached via a gravel dam several hundred meters long that has come out of the water. Freshwater reservoirs are reported to be only a third full even now, after the winter, and everywhere there is the same explanation: There is not enough water, from above and from the mountains, where this winter more than 50 percent less snow has fallen than before. Too little water changes the well-known and proven processes. And these processes are the basis of agriculture in northern Italy, which accounts for a third of the country’s production. Last year, Italy was hit by the worst drought that people can remember, with crop losses worth six billion euros and threats to hydroelectric power supplies. And because a little rain doesn’t help either, the experts and even the politicians are worried unusually early in the year.

Giorgia Meloni’s government in Rome has convened a crisis team to continuously monitor the situation. The communities living near Lake Garda are discussing the first measures to save water. A well-known problem is the leaky pipes throughout the country, some of which lose more than half of the water and are to be replaced – a mammoth project. However, environmentalists are demanding much more: a permanent change of course in agriculture, the unsealing of the soil in the vicinity of cities, more water-saving construction and production. The debate is on, only one thing seems certain: summer is coming and it will be hot and dry. Marc Beise

In France, the water comes by tanker

In some French regions it has been banned in recent weeks to wash the car, water the flowers in the garden and water the lawns in sports stadiums. The Var department in southern France has banned the construction of new swimming pools for the next five years. In some French communities, the water reservoirs were so empty that a tanker truck had to supply them. According to the Ministry of the Environment, four departments are still on high alert.

Secheresse hivernale, winter drought, is the name of the phenomenon the country is suffering from. It didn’t rain in France for more than 30 days in January and February. Longer than ever in winter since weather records began in 1959. The stately Lac Montbel in south-west France was now just a puddle, with just 20 percent of the reservoir still full. Rivers such as the Rhône and the Garonne carried significantly less water than usual at this time of year.

At the beginning of winter, President Emmanuel Macron called for saving electricity because of the energy crisis, now he is calling for water saving. “France needs an austerity plan,” said President Emmanuel Macron a few days ago at the agricultural fair in Paris. Instead of being forced to regulate the scarce water at the last moment, it is important to plan early. His government is now to draw up a water-saving plan.

Even though the long-awaited rain has been falling over many French regions in the past few days, experts are concerned. Especially in the south of the country, the ground is so dry that the water cannot penetrate deeply. In order to compensate for the deficit, it would have to rain around ten liters per square meter every day across the country in March, calculated the climatologist Serge Zaka in the newspaper Liberation – and that is impossible. The time between November and March is particularly important to fill up the groundwater reservoir. As announced by the State Institute for Geosciences (BRGM).three quarters of French aquifers were less full in January than in previous years.

France had already suffered from a severe drought last summer, with record heat and forest fires in several regions. This year, the first forests in Perpignan, southern France, were already burning at the beginning of February. Kathrin Müller-Lance

Catalonia limits water consumption

Open detailed view

Spain has been suffering from a lack of rainfall for months. The situation has recently improved because it rained a lot in December, but according to a report by the Ministry of the Environment, ten percent of the entire country is still affected by drought. This applies above all to northern Spain and parts of Andalusia and Castile-La Mancha.

Minister Teresa Ribera warned in January that Spain will have to adapt to repeated extreme scenarios in the long term. The government has announced €23 billion in spending to protect and improve the country’s water supply. “We cannot rely on rain alone to ensure the supply of drinking water or water for economic purposes,” Ribera said.

Due to climate change, droughts in southern Spain are becoming longer and rainfall shorter but more intense. As a result, the reservoirs cannot fill up properly: Normally, the reservoirs are two-thirds full in winter, while the national average is currently only 44 percent.

In many regions there are already restrictions on water consumption. At the end of February, the government of Catalonia also issued new regulations: public areas and private gardens may no longer be irrigated, agriculture must reduce its water consumption by 40 percent, industry by 15 percent and the daily amount of water per inhabitant is reduced from 250 to 230 liters lowered.

Large parts of Spain were already very dry in 2022. In many regions, rainfall did not even reach 75 percent of its normal level – and there are no signs that the situation will improve anytime soon. The Spanish weather service is already warning of a “long-term drought” in view of the latest records. Celine Chorus

Yellow and red warning colors in Germany

Open detailed view

Tankers are still a long way off in Germany, but an unusually low level of the Rhine has made it clear that there was not enough precipitation in winter. The level is back now gone up, but the precipitation of the past few days does not change the diagnosis: Germany is too dry for this time of year. This is also shown by the drought monitor of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research: The map of Germany provides information on how moist the soil is down to a depth of about 1.80 meters. Currently, it’s largely yellow for “unusually dry” to red (“extraordinary drought”).

Open detailed view

“It’s total madness that the drought isn’t ending even in the winter months,” says Helmholtz scientist Andreas Marx. It has always been too dry in large parts of Germany since 2018. Only in some areas, such as Bavaria, was the drought interrupted by a rainy summer in 2021. One result: more than 500,000 hectares of forest have been lost.

What does that mean for this year? For agriculture, which works close to the surface, no statement can be made, says Marx – if it rains enough, there will be a good harvest. As far as the deeper layers are concerned, in which trees are rooted, there would have to be an above-average amount of precipitation for six months for the yellow to red hues to disappear from the drought monitor. And it is already clear that less new groundwater will form in 2023 than normal. Many cities and communities are already in the process of preparing for longer periods of drought. They network their drinking water supply with each other, some are considering long-distance pipelines.

Is Germany drying up? Marx reassures – at least a little. “On average, Germany remains a water-rich country,” he says. But: “The likelihood that these extreme drought events, including multi-year ones, will occur again is increasing.” In the future it will be important “that we get the water that we have too much in winter into the summer”. Claudia Henzler