Recent developments in some long-term drought drivers

The droughts that hit North and North Western Europe in 2018 and 2019 served as a wake-up call that also temperate regions are affected by these kind of slow progressing or creeping disasters. The impacts of these meteorological droughts may have been exacerbated by long-term drivers, such as land-use changes, changes that are spread over a long time span, even difficult visible for an individual, but make a big difference in how the rare weather event impacts a region. In this paper we introduce three long-term drivers, forest fires in Europe, urbanisation, and deforestation. We try to provide a first assessment of their trends, mainly using satellite imagery created statistics. The relationship between drought impact and these landuse changes is hardly quantified and probably also impossible to quantify to the extent classical science would require. Therefore we first focus on the trend of this possible drought exacerbating land use changes, hoping that we, for drought combatting do not have to follow the same winded road that open societies followed when combatting lung cancer through smoking bans or climate heating through phasing out fossil gas exhaustion into the atmosphere. Perhaps common sense could be enough this time. After this short survey we can conclude that the extent and the number of wildfires increased remarkably in Europe. Deforestation is still occurring in the tropics, with a loss of 12% in the last 30 years but halted in the northern regions. Urbanisation has more than doubled in the same time span in the tropics and subtropics, mostly at the expense of forests, while in Europe urbanization took place mainly in the northern part of the continent. None of these implicit drought drivers follows a favourable trend, a plea for precise monitoring and a quick curb.

DE JAGER Alfred;  CORBAN Christina;  SABO Filip; 

2022-02-28

MDPI AG

JRC125731

2225-1154 (online),   

https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/10/3/31,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC125731,   

10.3390/cli10030031 (online),