CLIMATE CHANGE: Europe Finds Extremes

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Sep 5 2005 (IPS) - Extreme weather conditions in Europe ranging from forest fires to floods are a consequence of human-made global warming, scientists say.

This summer floods in the Central European rivers, the Danube, the Isar, and the Inn have killed more than 100 people. Thousands of villages and cities have had to be evacuated in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Germany.

At the same time, fires ignited by unusually high temperatures have destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest in Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy.

“We are already witnessing global warming,” Andreas Troge, president of the German Federal Environmental Agency told IPS. “Higher temperatures mean higher air humidity and frequent and stronger rain. This is what climate scientists have been predicting for years.”

Director of the United Nations Environmental Programme Klaus Toepfer told German media that “the worldwide growth of strong rains, droughts and storms suggests that the greenhouse effect and global warming are already taking place.”

Toepfer said scientific evidence had proved that “glaciers are melting, ice in the poles is degrading, and extreme weather forms are gaining in frequency. All this corresponds to the effects predicted by science as a consequence of global warming.”

Forest fires have destroyed more than 200,000 hectares of forest in Spain, up to 180,000 in Portugal, and more than 20,000 hectares in France. Over the past five years fires in Portugal have consumed some 900,000 hectares of forest, representing more than a quarter of 3.4 million hectares of forest land, according to the General Forestry Directorate.

Heavy rains and a cold spell helped control fires for a while last month but they spread again as temperatures rose.

The other extreme was reached in Northern Spain that saw snowfall in the Pyrenean region of Northern Catalonia in the districts of Val d’Aran, Pallars Sobir, Cerdanya Lleida and Ripolls Girona. The snowfall was most unusual in the middle of summer.

Meanwhile, in southern Europe cities along rivers had to be protected with sandbags, and troops were called in to rescue residents. In the border region between Austria, Germany and Switzerland, floods brought life to a halt in entire cities such as Passau, Regensburg, Bern and Ingolstadt.

Losses are estimated to run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Environmental activists and climate experts are urging governments to bring in new construction regulations along rivers. “It is clear that governments should from now on prohibit construction along rivers and areas historically affected by inundations,” Troge said.

Environmentalists are also demanding a review of damaging agricultural practices, and a return to natural farming. Intensive agriculture leads to “a growing sealing of the ground, reducing the ground’s natural capacity to leave rain to trickle down,” Ewald Schnug, researcher at the German Research Centre for Organic Agriculture told IPS.

“The capacity of organic agriculture to let water trickle down into the ground is twice that of conventional, intensive agriculture,” Schnug said. “In the event of heavy rains, this difference can be of great significance.”

Organic agriculture must therefore be evaluated not only for the quality of the agricultural products, but also for its contribution to giving back the ground its capacity to swallow enormous amounts of water without allowing erosion, he said.