Climate change is scarring Europe, and southern countries most of all

Europe continues to warm twice as fast as the global average as the climate crisis takes an increasing “human, economic and environmental toll” on the Continent, according to a report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS).

Last year was marked by extreme heat, drought and wildfires, while sea surface temperatures around Europe, including the Atlantic, reached new highs, accompanied by marine heatwaves and unprecedented glacier melt, the report found.

The State of the Climate in Europe 2022 shows how Europe has been warming twice as much as the global average since the 1980s, with far-reaching impacts on the region’s socioeconomic fabric and ecosystems. Europe last year was approximately 2.3 degrees above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) average used as a baseline for the Paris climate agreement.

In a sign of hope for the future, however, it says renewable energy generated more electricity than polluting fossil last year in Europe – wind and solar power generated 22.3 per cent of EU electricity, overtaking fossil fuel (20 per cent).

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“For the first time, more electricity was generated by wind and solar than by fossil fuel in the EU. Increasing use of renewables and low-carbon energy sources is crucial to reduce dependence on fossil fuels,” said WMO secretary general Prof Petteri Taalas.

“Climate services [providing information to help end users make climate-smart decisions] play a key role in ensuring the resilience of energy systems to climate-related shocks, in planning operations, and in informing measures to increase energy efficiency,” he added.

The report highlights how more extreme weather – including intense heat, heavy precipitation and droughts – have growing implications for the supply, demand and infrastructure of Europe’s energy system. It was released on Monday to coincide with the sixth European Climate Change Adaptation Conference in Dublin Castle and is accompanied by an interactive story map.

“The record-breaking heat stress that Europeans experienced in 2022 was one of the main drivers of weather-related excess deaths in Europe,” it says.

This cannot be considered a one-off occurrence or an oddity of the climate, said CCCS director Dr Carlo Buontempo. “These kinds of events are part of a pattern that will make heat stress extremes more frequent and more intense across the region,” he added.

Based on the Emergency Events Database, meteorological, hydrological and climate-related hazards in Europe in 2022 resulted in 16,365 reported fatalities and directly affected 156,000 people, it notes.

About 67 per cent of events were flood-and storm-related, accounting for most of the total economic damages of about US$2 billion. Much more severe, in terms of mortality, were the heatwaves linked to more than 16,000 “excess deaths”.

“In 2022, many countries in western and south-western Europe had their warmest year on record. Summer was the hottest ever recorded: the high temperatures exacerbated the severe and widespread drought conditions, fuelled violent wildfires that resulted in the second largest burnt area on record, and led to thousands of heat-associated excess deaths,” said Prof Taalas.

Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK all had their warmest year on record. The annual average temperature for Europe was between the second and fourth highest on record, “with an anomaly of about 0.79 degrees above the 1991–2020 average”.

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Precipitation was below average across much of the Continent in 2022. It was the fourth dry year in a row on the Iberian Peninsula, and the third consecutive dry year in the mountain regions of the Alps and Pyrenees. France had its driest January to September, and the UK and Uccle (Belgium) had their driest January to August since 1976, with far-reaching consequences for agriculture and energy production. Spain’s water reserve decreased to 41.9 per cent of its total capacity by July 26th – with even lower capacity in some basins.

Glaciers in Europe lost about 880 km3 of ice from 1997 to 2022. The Alps were worst affected, with an average reduction in ice thickness of 34 metres. Glaciers in the European Alps last year experienced a new record mass loss in one single year, caused by very low winter snow amounts, a very warm summer and Saharan dust deposition.

The Greenland ice sheet lost 5,362 gigatonnes of ice between 1972 and 2021, contributing about 14.9mm to global mean sea-level rise and continued to lose mass during 2022, the reports says.

Average sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic area were the warmest on record and large portions of the region’s seas were affected by severe and extreme marine heatwaves, leading to “migration of species and mass extinctions, arrival of invasive species, and disruption of ecosystems and biodiversity”.

Rates of surface ocean warming, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic and Black Seas, and the southern Arctic were more than three times the global average.

Energy

The report underlines the importance of “meteorological variables”, such as surface solar radiation for photovoltaic panels (PV), wind speed for wind power, and precipitation and runoff for hydropower. More surface solar radiation is available in the south of Europe due to the solar angle and reduced cloud coverage. Wind power potential is higher over the ocean, especially off the coast of Ireland and Portugal and the Aegean Sea. Hydropower is directly linked to the topography of Europe.

But the meteorological factors driving the potential for renewable energy have large seasonal variability, the reports says. The monthly average of wind speed can vary from -40 to +80 per cent of the average, precipitation can vary by plus or minus 30 per cent, and surface solar radiation about by plus or minus 15 per cent.

Solar and wind tend to complement each other throughout the year: solar radiation is higher in the summer half of the year while wind intensity is usually higher in winter. Over the 30-year period 1991–2020, surface solar radiation has increased to the highest levels since records began, whereas wind speed and precipitation do not show a significant trend, it concludes.

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Nuclear energy

Globally, interruptions to nuclear power operations due to adverse climatic conditions have increased over the past three decades, though they still make up a very small share of total nuclear outages. In 2021, reported weather-related production losses accounted for approximately 0.33 per cent of nuclear generation. Low river flows and increasing temperatures and heat extremes are the major factors.

There is, however, a particular concern in southern Europe. “Under worsening climate scenarios in the long-term, southern Europe could see some of the largest global percentage increases in extreme temperatures above 40 degrees and in number of consecutive dry days,” the report says.

“This result, particularly for potential nuclear plant sites in southern Europe, underscores the necessity of establishing adaptation provisions associated with strict safety revisions, if the decision is taken that plants should continue to operate.”

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