France had been one of the hardest hit by the hot and dry conditions across Europe with firefighters battling a “monster” blaze in forests in the south-west of France.
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From dry and cracked reservoirs in Spain to falling water levels on major arteries like the Danube, the Rhine and the Po, the unprecedented drought is afflicting nearly half of Europe.
There has been no significant rainfall for almost two months in the continent’s western, central and southern regions. In typically rainy Britain, the government officially declared a drought across southern and central England on Friday amid one of the hottest and driest summers on record.
Europe’s dry period is expected to continue in what experts say could be the worst drought in 500 years.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Center warned this week that drought conditions will get worse and potentially affect 47 per cent of the continent.
Andrea Toreti, a senior researcher at the European Drought Observatory, said a drought in 2018 was so extreme that there were no similar events for the last 500 years, “but this year, I think, it is really worse”.
For the next three months, “we still see a very high risk of dry conditions over Western and Central Europe, as well as the UK,” Toreti said.
Current conditions result from long periods of dry weather caused by changes in world weather systems, said meteorologist Peter Hoffmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin.
“It’s just that in summer we feel it the most,” he said. “But actually the drought builds up throughout the year.”