Climate change has made agricultural drought at least 20 times more likely
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The climate changes globally, temperatures rise everywhere. With consequences also at the local level, in different parts of the world. However, these must be studied, quantified and demonstrated: this is what an international team of scientists from the Eth of Zurich and other research institutes has just done, which has wondered if and to what extent climate change and the increase in temperatures – theboreal summer of 2022 was one of the hottest ever recorded, with over 24 thousand waves of anomalous heat – have influenced the drought that hit the northern hemisphere of the world. The answers, just published, are yes and a lot: climate change caused by anthropogenic activitythe experts wrote, made soil drought at least 20 times more likelythreatening agricultural production and adding further pressure to food prices and food security.
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In the study, the researchers analyzed soil moisture at periodic intervals (June, July and August 2022) in different locations in the Northern Hemisphere, excluding tropical areas and focusing specifically on Western and Central Europe, which suffered from particularly heavy drought waves that significantly reduced the size of harvests. By definition we speak of “agricultural drought” or “ecological” when the soil moisture levels are particularly low in the first meter of depth, because it is from there that the plants, through the roots, extract the water necessary for their sustenance.
By crossing the data of this monitoring with those of the temperatures and of emissionsthe authors of the work deduced that climate change has made agricultural drought at least twenty times more likely, and calculated that drought conditions similar to those of 2022 will return to occur, on average, once every twenty years (if the climate system remains as it is); if mankind had not altered the climate so heavily, these conditions would have occurred more or less once every 400 years.
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“The summer of 2022,” he explained Sonia Seneviratneprofessor of Land-Climate Dynamics at Eth, “showed how human-induced climate change has increased the risk of agricultural and biological drought in the densely populated and cultivated regions of the northern hemisphere. It is for this reason, we reiterate again, that we must gradually eliminate the exploitation of fossil fuels if we want to stabilize the climatic conditions and avoid a further worsening of the waves of drought “.
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