BLOG

WATER POLITICS

Courtesy of The Economist, a look at the arid spells across Europe’s south:

THE Gonella Hut, more than 3,000 metres up on the Italian side of Monte Bianco, should be bustling with climbers in August. Instead, it is empty. Davide Gonella, the manager, closed it at the end of last month for lack of water.

“The snowfield we use for our supply had gone,” he says. The high summer temperatures that have seared southern Europe this year were only partly to blame. When he reopened his refuge in early June, Mr Gonella could already see the snowfield was much smaller than usual, because so little snow had fallen last winter.

It is a story repeated with variations from the north-western edge of Spain to the south-eastern tip of Italy. At Bracciano outside Rome, rainfall in the first half of the year was more than 80% below its ten-year average. This has shrunk the lake of the same name, which is the capital’s main water source. By late July Lake Bracciano was only 10cm above the level at which government scientists see a real risk of an ecological collapse, making water undrinkable without costly purification. A regional government ban on drawing further supplies from the lake was partially suspended on July 28th, averting the threat of eight-hour-a-day stoppages in the capital. But the ban will resume on September 1st, just as consumption revives with the return of Romans from their summer holidays.

Agriculture has been badly hit. Farmers in Castilla y León, Spain’s largest cereal-growing region, expect to lose 60-70% of their crops. The drought has also encouraged forest fires. More than 10,000 people were evacuated from homes and campsites in July because of a huge blaze in south-eastern France. Fires have raged this summer in Corsica, along the Adriatic coast and on the Greek island of Kythera. 

Even so, says Jürgen Vogt of the Commission’s European Drought Observatory, the current emergency is not more serious than others in recent years. Nor, surprisingly, have scientists agreed on whether the intensity and frequency of droughts is increasing in Europe. Against a background of global warming, that might seem inevitable. But since evaporation (from sea, lakes and rivers) and evapotranspiration (from the land) lead to increased rainfall, higher temperatures do not necessarily cause more droughts. Problems do arise if the offsetting rainfall is unevenly distributed—as seems to be the case in Europe. Evidence has mounted over the past 30-odd years of a shift towards wetter winters in northern Europe and, says Mr Vogt, of “drier conditions in the Mediterranean, especially in spring and summer, the critical times of year for drought”.

Gregor Gregoric, who co-ordinates the Drought Management Centre for Southeastern Europe, says that since the 1980s that region has suffered a significant drought on average every five years. Even his lush Slovenian homeland has been hit.

“The problem is that agriculture is not adjusting,” he says. Traditionally, Slovenian farmers have eschewed irrigation. It was difficult to convince them they might need it now, if only to fall back on. Nor were they keen to diversify crops to include strains less sensitive to drought. “Farmers are quite conservative people,” sighs Mr Gregoric. Unless there is a strong reason to change, they are inclined to follow the same methods as their fathers and grandfathers did.

They are not the only ones who must adapt to new realities. Mediterranean droughts have been seen hitherto as freak events, but that no longer holds good, says the EDO’s Mr Vogt. The challenge is not one of coping with emergencies, but of risk management for the indefinite future.