The drought in parts of France is so bad right now that some authorities have banned new home-building projects—for the next four years. Despite a severe housing shortage in France, new homes just aren't worth the drain on water resources that construction, and eventual new residents, would cause, say nine communes in the south of the country.
It's just one of many signs that Europe is running dry. "What we are looking at is something like a multiyear drought," says Rohini Kumar of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. Unusually low rainfall and snowfall was recorded this winter not just in France but also in the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, and parts of Italy and Germany. The current predicament follows European droughts in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022.
Last summer, drought exacerbated by record temperatures around the continent was in the headlines. The subsequent dry winter has meant that many aquifers—places underground that retain water—and surface reservoirs have not had a chance to recover. Now, summer beckons once again, and experts who spoke to WIRED are worried that a severe water shortage could threaten lives, industry, and biodiversity in a big way.
The European Drought Observatory tracks indicators of drought across the continent, including from satellite measurements, and suggests that vast regions are far drier than they should be. "Honestly, all over Central Europe, this issue, it's a widespread problem," says Carmelo Cammalleri at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
He estimates that reservoirs in France and northern Italy are about 40 to 50 percent lower than they should be. The longest river in Italy, the Po, is 60 percent below its normal levels. Not only that, there is roughly half the usual snow on the Alps than would be expected for this time of year. That's a huge problem, because much of Central Europe relies on meltwater from these famous mountains every spring. "The Alps are known as the water towers of Europe for a reason," says Cammalleri.
France has just experienced its driest winter for 60 years. In some places, you can find extreme examples of how people have been affected. Take the village of Coucouron in the south of the country, where a truck has had to deliver drinking water up to 10 times a day since July—without any hiatus during the supposedly wetter months.
In the UK, also, many rivers are at record lows. And look to the Rhine, an arterial river that rises in the Alps and flows through multiple countries toward the North Sea. It fell considerably last year, causing massive headaches for barges that use it to transport goods. Right now, the river level is 1 to 2 meters below average for this time of year, according to some estimates. Lucie Fahrner, a spokeswoman for the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, denies that the river level is low at present, despite its lower-than-average levels, adding that various measures to help shipping cope with drought in the future are currently being evaluated.
What happens during the next few months will really matter. Abundant rainfall could ease the situation and stave off the worst-case scenario. But Europe needs a lot. "We're talking about a sea, a sea's worth of water," says Hannah Cloke at the University of Reading in the UK. In terms of volume, hundreds of millions of cubic liters of rain would have to fall across the continent to fill the deficit, she estimates. It would have to amount to higher-than-average rainfall for France and certain other places, including parts of the UK. The chances of that are, unfortunately, not high.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday March 15 2023, @08:58PM (2 children)
We've got too much water. It's always falling out of the sky. We'll pay you to take it away. And the midgies. Do you want them too?
Seriously, though, we have too much. We could export some. It's something that needs to be explored.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @06:49AM (1 child)
Aye, and as I type this I can hear the overspill from the overwhelmed gutters here in the town where 'it always fucking rains...'.
Midgies?, leave them be, they're vital to preserving our ecosystems and we need millions o' the bloodsucking wee bastards until we can establish a healthy population of wolves as the midgies are currently the only thing keeping the bloody tourist numbers in check.
Oh and don't have 'too much' of the stuff, we've just been a wee bit lax in the converting of it into the whisky.
Seriously, the last thing we want is any further commercialisation of our water, it's bad enough the French were desperately trying to worm their way into the mismanglement of Scottish Water in some sort of attempt at backdoor privatisation when the UK was part of the EU, and one suspects it's privatisation will be part of any future 'dowry' in the (increasingly unlikely) event of an independent Scotland trying to rejoin that clamjamfry.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday March 16 2023, @05:48PM
I believe many EU countries have state-owned utilities, so despite what the Kippers claimed before Brexit, I don't think this really is an issue.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2023, @09:07PM
"Mustafa, eat your vegetables! People in Europe are starving!"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2023, @09:38PM
We have to rescue the banks!
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday March 15 2023, @09:43PM
Your drought will end. Perhaps badly.
I personally cannot complain. I don't live next to a body of water that's flooding, and my roof did not collapse from snow. I only got about a foot of wet snow on it from one storm. That's crazy enough. People who've lived here decades never saw such a thing.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Funny) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 15 2023, @09:54PM
Let's see. A liter is a unit of volume. Cube it and its a measure for 9-dimensional hypervolume.
Quick! We'd better hurry and get the ten-dimensional quantum gravity theories into production!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @06:29AM
Quick everyone! We must leave this desert full of thieves and guns for this foreign place with scarce water! Pack your guns, knives, books of hate and the many children and flee to the boats that will take us to this foreign land so we can get away from the people here!
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Thursday March 16 2023, @08:42AM (2 children)
Many European power plants rely on rivers for cooling water. So this drought threatens energy supplies.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday March 16 2023, @09:38AM (1 child)
Specifically, it threatens nuclear power plants -- the ones located deep inside the country, along a river (of which there are plenty in France).
(Score: 0, Troll) by Coligny on Thursday March 16 2023, @10:01AM
It’s ok , those french morans mothballed half of their (well our) nukaplants… so cooling might not be too much of an issue…
(And yes, it’s much moar complicamated than this…. But at this point…. Who cares… that ship is going down and unlike the titanic, it will go down with the lights out….)
If I wanted to be moderated by mor0nic groupthinking retards I would still be on Digg and Reddshit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quietus on Thursday March 16 2023, @09:49AM
The physical reason isn't mentioned, which is pretty simple: warmer air holds more moisture. The end result are different precipitation patterns (as that moisture can be transported further), and when that moisture finally drops out, more intense rain. One of the challenges in my neck of the woods is how to prepare for another 'water bomb' as happened 2 years ago in the border region with Germany.