LA HERRADURA, Spain — “Herders and farmers have their feet on the ground, but their eyes on the sky.” The old saying is still popular in Spain’s rural communities who, faced with recurrent droughts, have historically paraded sculptures of saints to pray for rain, according to AP.
The saints are out again this year as large swaths of Spain face one of the driest winters on record. Even as irrigation infrastructure boomed along with industrial farming, the country’s ubiquitous dams and desalination plants are up against a looming water crisis scientists have been warning about for decades.
“We are facing a drastic situation,” said Juan Camacho, a farmer in the southern province of Granada, as he looked hopelessly at withered leaves of avocado plants and their fruits, smaller than usual this year.
Not far from his orchard, the region’s largest reservoir is down to 15 per cent of its capacity following over two months without a drop of rain. And at least half of that, Camacho said, “is just muddy water, completely useless.”
Declining agricultural yields in Europe — and the battle for diminishing water resources, especially in the southern continent — are perils that lie ahead as global temperatures continue to rise, the world’s top climate scientists said this week.
Their conclusions are part of a report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released Monday. The panel’s periodic assessments inform policymaker decisions about how to prevent the planet from warming beyond the 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) already gained since industrial times.
For Europe, heat and flooding in addition to agricultural losses and water scarcity will be major climate impacts, the report said. And while European awareness of global warming motivates policymakers to do more, scientists say the ambition and execution of solutions vary greatly from country to country.
Extreme heat, floods and droughts will lead to widespread disruption of the economy, including damage to infrastructure and energy supplies, the need for more air conditioning and greater water demand, the report warned.
As warming rises faster in Europe than the global mean, panelists paint a picture of a continent divided in two: an increasingly arid south, struggling with desertification and competing for scarcer water — and a north adopting a more traditional Mediterranean climate that could provide some increased crop yields and forest growth, but with risks of its own.
If temperatures rise an additional 1.9 degrees Celsius (3.4 Fahrenheit), corn harvest losses could reach 50%, especially in southern Europe, the report warned. Harvests of wheat, meanwhile, could increase in the north as long as warming doesn’t exceed 2 degrees since pre-industrial levels — or 0.9 degrees above the current average temperature.
But this is no silver lining. From a continental perspective, the report says that due to combined heat and drought, “substantive agricultural production losses are projected for most European areas over the 21st century, which will not be offset by gains in Northern Europe.”
“There are some vegetables and warm climate crops that might see benefits in the short term,” Rachel Licker, a climate expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Associated Press. “But the major cereal crops, the major commodities, the major crops that are exported and really form the basis of a lot of the economy are the ones that are likely to be negatively affected.”
Europe will also suffer other negative impacts. Coastal damage is projected to increase at least tenfold by the end of the century — and, if the 3 degree Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) warming threshold is reached, “damage costs and people affected by precipitation and river flooding may double.”
For some coastal communities it will be “an existential threat,” the report said, adding that traditional lifestyles of the Sami and the Nenets peoples are already under threat in the European Arctic.
Inequality is expected to grow within and among countries as the continent sees more deaths from heatstroke, unbearable summers and irreparable damage to ecosystems.
Joaquín Montes, 50, is among those set to lose more. He is one of roughly 10 million farmers in the European Union who feed 440 million consumers inside and outside the bloc.
Sandwiched between the tourist-magnet Costa del Sol and the Sierra Nevada range in southern Spain, the ravines where Montes’ custard apple and avocado orchards sit should have plenty of water.
