Area of drought impact rising in the EU

According to the European Environment Agency Europe experienced one of the hottest summer in 2022 with 631,000 square kilometers under drought impact (status as of October 2023). The agency calculated that this is an almost five-fold increase compared to the annual impact during 2000-2022, when around 167,000 square kilometers (4.2%) of EU land was affected every year by droughts due to low precipitation, high evaporation and heatwaves fueled by climate change. Although data for 2023 regarding drought impact are not available, last year the June-July-August (JJA) season for 2023 was the warmest on record globally by a large margin. Further, the European-average temperature for summer was 19.63C, which at 0.83C above average, was the fifth warmest for the summer season. However, the June-July-August season saw above-average precipitation over most of western Europe, with local rainfall records broken leading to flooding in some cases (Slovenia for example) resulting to other monetary losses from weather-related disasters.