How climate change will widen Europe’s divides – POLITICOhttps://www.politico.eu/article/how-climate-change-will-widen-european-divide-road-to-cop26/Europe’s north will struggle with floods and fires, even with warming at the lowest end of expectations — the Paris Agreement limits of 1.5 or 2 degrees above the pre-industrial global average. But the south will be hammered by drought, urban heat and agricultural decline, driving a wedge into one of the European Union’s biggest political fault lines.
That is the major finding from a POLITICO survey of more than 100 scientific papers, interviews with climate scientists and a leaked draft of the next report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a 4,200-page study that is science’s most advanced inquiry to date of the impacts of climate change on our world.
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During la canicule, the heat wave of 2003, European cities cooked their people. It was the hottest August in at least half a millennium, temperatures in the high 30s squatted over much of the continent for weeks. The EU estimates that something like 80,000 people died. French President Jacques Chirac attended a somber burial service for 57 people whose bodies were never claimed.
Under any future warming scenario, a summer like 2003 will be disturbingly normal. According to EU research, at 1.5 degrees of warming, around one in every five people in the EU and U.K. will experience similar heat in any given year. At 3 degrees, that rises to more than half the population.
The heat is literally maddening. Italian researchers found a strong link between psychiatric emergencies and daily temperature. Suicides doubled in Moscow during a heat wave in 2010. In Madrid, incidents of domestic violence and women being murdered by their partners jump when the temperature goes over 34 degrees. Hot nights bring climate insomnia.
We aren’t helping ourselves. An increasing share of Europeans have made their homes in giant, heat-concentrating concrete crucibles. Cities are typically 5 to 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. If little is done to reduce global emissions, Europe’s cities could warm 6 to 10 degrees on top of that. The south will see the greatest increases. In Rome and other Mediterranean cities, the heat will become so intense that traditional architectural systems relying on natural ventilation will no longer function.
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The good news, for at least some of Europe’s farmers, is that climate change can deliver winners. Warmer winters, longer growing seasons and more rain mean parts of Europe, in particular the north, will produce more food than today.
For other parts of the continent, however, a warmer world spells disaster. Climate change will draw a curtain of rain across Europe. Higher latitudes will get wetter, while Southern Europe dries up. Droughts are expected to get more frequent and more extreme, creeping across Europe’s southern and central plains.
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At 2 degrees warming, 9 percent of Europe’s population may be competing over inadequate water supplies. In Southern Europe, the IPCC draft warns, more than a third of the population will have less water than they need. If temperatures rise by 3 degrees, regions suffering from droughts in Europe could double from 13 percent to 26 percent.
The areas bordering the Mediterranean will be hardest hit, with the proportion of land regularly experiencing droughts expanding from 28 percent to 49 percent in the most extreme cases. Dry spells there would also last longer — nearly half of every year, up from two months today. Some parts of the Iberian Peninsula could experience drought for more than seven months every year.
The loss of rain will make it harder to grow many staple crops in Southern Europe. Farmers will see traditional crops flee north ahead of the advancing Sahara, which is already jumping the Mediterranean Sea. At 2 degrees warming, agricultural biomes will shift north at a rate of 25 kilometers to 135 kilometers a decade.
Yields of wheat in Southern Europe — where successive civilizations have cultivated it for thousands of years — will fall by 12 percent while growing 5 percent in the north. Under extreme warming scenarios, southern wheat production collapses by as much as half. But even at 1.5 degrees it will be near impossible to grow maize across much of Spain, France, Italy and the Balkans without irrigation. In a cultural catastrophe for Italy, the best tomatoes might one day be German.
Far-sighted farmers are trying to hold water on the land by scraping small dams or planting trees. Farms with irrigation will hold out longer. But when those adaptations meet the rolling water shortages on the Mediterranean rim, they will eventually fail
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Farms are already being abandoned across the continent. In the south, the EU views climate change as a major new factor driving families from the land, perhaps into increasingly hotter cities. Rural communities and their traditions wither. Farms, managed for generations, now run wild, creating new habitats, but also stocking the land with dry fuel and increasing the risk of mega fires.
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In the increasingly sun- and rain-drenched north, land values rise by around 9 percent for every degree of temperature rise. If no efforts are made to change farming techniques to suit the new climate, land values in large parts of Spain, southern France, Italy and Greece could stagnate or fall over the next 80 years. By far the largest downturn will be in Italy, currently one of Europe’s biggest producers.
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farmers outside the southern desiccation zone might be entering a gilded era. As temperatures rise, other parts of the world that were once productive — including Punjab, the Middle East, Africa’s Sahel and Southeast Asia — will be growing less and less of anything. Global supply will be squeezed, increasing food prices that deliver an apocalypse windfall to Northern Europe. Southern agriculture will be dying on the vine, even as farmers in Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands cash in....
Projections over this century suggest most parts of Europe will experience up to 35 percent more extreme rainstorms in the winter, particularly in the north. If warming continues beyond 1.5 degrees, floods could become an annual problem for about 5 million Europeans, the IPCC draft report says, rather than once a century.
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If warming reaches 3 degrees by the end of the century, river floods could hit nearly half a million people annually, up from 170,000 now. Damage could jump sixfold, from €7.8 billion a year today, the Commission’s research arm has warned. In 2002, floods along Central Europe’s major rivers — the Elbe and Danube — killed dozens of people, destroyed homes, and racked up billions in damages in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia. River flooding will be concentrated in Northern and Central Europe and the U.K. and Ireland, while the south roasts
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In the Mediterranean, the sea level could rise by as much as 1.1 meters by 2100, depending on how much the planet warms. That exposes 42 million people currently living in low-lying areas, accounting for 37 percent of the coastline. Scandinavia will suffer less from sea level rise because its landmass is still rebounding after being covered by heavy ice sheets in the last ice age.
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Europe’s cooler climate previously made life tough for many mosquito species and the diseases they carry. But rising temperatures have spurred the advance of a particularly prolific disease carrier: the Asian tiger mosquito, so named for the white stripes that run across its body. Known as the world’s most invasive mosquito, it arrived in Italy in 1990 and is now established across the Mediterranean and is pushing as far north as Belgium and the Netherlands. At 18 degrees, the tiger mosquitoes won’t spread chikungunya — a painful, aching fever for which there is no vaccine or treatment — but at 28 degrees they most definitely can.
Researchers at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control expect chikungunya will spread in Europe as the temperature warms. Alongside will come dengue fever and West Nile virus — a major outbreak of the latter during the 2018 heat wave killed 180 people in 10 countries. Similar to mosquitoes, the range of ticks carrying encephalitis and Lyme disease is expected to creep northward into Scandinavia (although it’s likely to become too hot for them in the south) and into higher altitude Alpine regions.
Then there is the return of malaria, which Europe eradicated through a huge post-war program of insecticide spraying, swamp draining and drug therapy. The Mediterranean remains entirely suitable for malaria transmission, and with warming, the insects and the parasites in their stomachs could reclaim their place in Europe.
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European policymakers are waking up to the fact that the EU’s emissions reductions won’t shield the bloc from climate nightmares. The European Commission came out with a new adaptation strategy in February that will provide the building blocks for the response. But “the speed of adaptation is lagging the speed of climate change,” the IPCC report said, adding that even the most full-blooded effort can’t outpace all the impacts of warming.
All the experts that POLITICO spoke with suggested that Europe’s more fortunate northerners would eventually be called upon to support their sweaty southern neighbors, just as it has offered payments for fossil fuel-producing regions to help workers ease out of polluting jobs.
That moment could come sooner than many expect. In Spain, the countryside is being consumed by desert, and Minister for the Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera is charged with holding back the sand. Unless Europe invests now in protecting the most affected places, she said, it risks a “worst-case scenario” and “a terrible political debate — all across Europe” over where to save and “where we must give up.”