Europe experienced its most extensive flooding in more than a decade last year, the EU’s climate change monitor reported yesterday, with almost one-third of its rivers swelling to bursting point.
Swathes of the continent were inundated during the year, with the worst hit Valencia in Spain, and central and eastern Europe, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said.
The disasters took place during the hottest year worldwide and underscore the threat that flooding poses for Europe, as the world warms because of human-driven climate change.
Photo: AFP
Storms and floods last year killed more than 300 people and affected 413,000 others across Europe, inflicting at least 18 billion euros (US$20.4 billion) in economic damage.
About 30 percent of Europe’s river network flooded in what was one of the continent’s 10 wettest years since 1950, Copernicus said in a report produced with the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.
“Europe saw the most widespread flooding since 2013,” Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs the Copernicus climate monitor, told journalists ahead of the report being published.
Up to three months of rain fell in just five days in September last year as Storm Boris brought immense flooding and widespread damage to eight nations in central and eastern Europe.
A month later, powerful storms whipped up by warm, moist air from the Mediterranean Sea dumped torrential rain over Spain, with subsequent floods devastating the eastern province of Valencia.
Most parts of western Europe experienced wetter-than-usual conditions last year, but eastern parts of the continent were on average drier and warmer.
Burgess said this east-west contrast was not directly linked to climate change, but opposite pressure systems that influenced cloud cover and the transport of moisture over different parts of the continent.
The storms that wreaked havoc over Europe were “likely more severe due to a warmer atmosphere holding more moisture,” she said.
“As our climate warms, we are seeing more — and more extreme — extreme events,” she added.
Since the 1980s, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average, making it the fastest-warming continent.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says extreme rainfall and flooding is projected to get worse in Europe in particular as the planet keeps warming.
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