Developing world drought threat to EU rice and cotton intensifies research efforts.
The report, entitled Vulnerabilities of Europe’s economy to global water scarcity and drought revealed that supplies of animal feed, rice, cotton, grapes and even pistachios could be impacted in the near future as they come from regions that have a shortage of water.
‘Right now it is more like an alert,’ said Professor Bart van den Hurk, who coordinates the EU-funded IMPREX project, which produced the report as part of its efforts to analyse the links between climate change and water.
According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves and droughts will rise over the coming years as man-made climate change takes hold.
Shocking Dr Ertug Ercin, the lead author of the report, said that they were surprised when they realised just how vulnerable some of Europe’s food products were.
‘Can you imagine the chocolate industry without cocoa,’ said Dr Ercin, from the Water Footprint Network, a Dutch non-governmental organisation which is part of the IMPREX project.
‘We always look at the supply side of the water issue,’ said said Dr Ercin.
Analysing water demand is part of a broader effort by the IMPREX project to encourage public officials and businesses to take climate change forecasts into account when making decisions by predicting how global warming will lead to extreme weather in Europe.
It’s in part driven by a personal commitment by Prof. van den Hurk to help people make better use of climate forecasts, where computer models can use satellite and ground measurements to extrapolate how climate change will affect us.
‘I’m really on a mission to embed this physical climate science further down the chain,’ he said.