🔥 After heatwaves comes the drought
Heatwaves used to be Europe's most famous climate impact. Now droughts are competing for the throne.
Hello there,
Today I’m graduating from a 12-week climate boot camp I’ve been getting nerdy with and in the last sessions with my study group we were asked to discuss adaptation strategies in our local context. I said Spain probably had to start figuring out its water problem and some of the American students in my group were surprised. “I didn’t know Europe had a water issue,” one of them said. While last summer’s heatwaves have normally stolen the thunder, droughts are snatching up more and more headlines.
Water is a growing problem for the continent as an unusually hot, dry winter has failed to replenish already low water levels after last year’s devastating drought. Winemakers in the Penedés region not too far from Barcelona told me they’ve been “praying for rain”. The Catalan politician Carme Forcadell even took to Twitter to ask the Virgin of Montserrat for a miracle consisting of “fine and constant rain in the whole country.” We’re still waiting.
And just to clarify — while water scarcity and drought are interconnected, they are not the same, writes the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium. In contrast to drought, water scarcity is not a temporary crisis but a structural imbalance between available water resources and demand, which changes with the seasons and economic activities.
Technically, Europe has been in drought since 2018, according to a recent study from the Graz University of Technology in Austria. Snowfall is key for replenishing rivers and reservoirs that provide water to people the rest of the year, but this winter the French Alps, the Pyrenees, and other mountains in Europe experienced much lower snowfall than usual, threatening already low water levels.
While we’re still far away from summer, meteorologists expect temperatures in some parts of Spain to hit almost 40°C this week as a mass of hot and dry air made its way up from Africa. 90% of Spain is either “very dry” or “extremely dry” as shown on the below map, and the country is experiencing 21% less rain on average than during the same time last year. “Drought” it like it’s hot?
In places like northern Italy, France, and Spain, the situation “raises concerns for water supply for human use, agriculture, and energy production,” reports Euronews Green. Whether or not it rains in the next few weeks will be crucial in determining what happens, as the European Commission predicts an even drier summer than in previous years. As this satellite image of the Doñana National Park in the south of Spain shows, this season is much more about 50 shades of brown than green.
Solutions?
If there’s one thing I’m taking away from both my climate boot camp and the climate panels I attended at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia last week, it’s that journalists need to go beyond just talking about climate impacts and statistics. So while we sadly can’t produce rain whenever and wherever we want, some adaptation strategies do exist.
European policymakers are already grappling with the challenge of finding solutions to the continent’s water problem and coming up with a better water distribution system. So what can be done?
“In the last ten years, there have been many scientific breakthroughs for making water treatment smarter and more circular. These solutions offer opportunities for using digital solutions, AI, and remote sensing to use water more efficiently and by reusing treated wastewater for irrigation and recovering energy and nutrients from wastewater,” writes Eva Enyedi for EIT Climate-KIC.
Ultimately, solutions need to both increase the supply of good quality water AND reduce its demand.
Reuse treated wastewater: Water treatment plants are increasingly collaborating with the agricultural sector (which uses A LOT of water) to reuse treated wastewater for things like irrigation. The Spanish region of Murcia, for example, reuses almost all the wastewater it treats for irrigation and the replenishment of aquifers.
Reducing leaks: This one seems pretty obvious but yeah, according to the United Nations, 100-200bn cubic meters of water could be saved globally by 2030 in urban areas simply by reducing leaks.
Agro-tech to save water: Agrowanalytics, a Spanish start-up, combines irrigation scheduling, monitoring, and analysis to irrigate crops with the exact amount of water needed for each particular crop, when it’s needed the most. This can help farmers save up to 30% of water resources.
Desalination of seawater: Desalination removes salt and minerals from seawater, freeing up water for consumption. However, these processes are expensive and require large amounts of energy. Saudi Arabia is utilizing solar-powered plants for desalination, while the UK is opting for small-scale facilities for agriculture.
What you can do (if you have some plumbing skills): Individual households can consider reusing water by rerouting sink water to flush the toilet. Seems like handymen on YouTube are getting creative with it.
👉 My latest piece on farmer resilience: I’m also dropping the link to the article I mentioned in the last newsletter: After Cyclone Freddy, how can Malawi’s farmers build climate resilience? [Devex]
Climate jargon of the week
💦 Desalination
Over 97% of the water on earth is unsuitable for human consumption due to its salinity. Purification of this saline water could help solve water scarcity issues in some places. However, purification of seawater is expensive, energy-intensive, and often has large adverse impacts on ecosystems.
There are three methods of desalination:
Evaporation: A method to obtain fresh water by condensation of vapor made by evaporation of seawater.
Reverse osmosis: Through this method, it’s possible to obtain fresh water by filtering seawater under pressure using a semi-permeable membrane through which seawater cannot pass.
Electrodialysis: Let’s you obtain fresh water using a special membrane that can separate seawater into diluate and concentrate, and then extract freshwater from the diluate. This is apparently at an experimental research stage, according to the UN’s Climate Technology Center.
Nice article! I liked some of the solutions, we all have to start working on solutions, we are very creative and we will succeed! I will be looking forward to the next articles :) greatings from Barcelona