A team of Newcastle University researchers have released a study that assesses the future changes in flood, heatwaves, and drought impacts for 571 European cities, finding that heatwave days will increase across all cities.
Additionally, the high-end climate change scenario projects that most cities will see increases in both drought and river flood risks.
Needless to say, it’s important to know how droughts, heat waves, and floods in European cities will change.
This has been assessed for 571 European cities under a high-end scenario of climate change.
All cities more frequent and hotter heat waves In this study, heat waves are defined as three consecutive days where both maximum and minimum temperatures exceed the upper five per cent of these values for the historical period.
The cities in Southern Europe see the largest increase in the number of heat wave days, possibly up to 69 per cent.
Southern European cities will see an increase in drought conditions: Future droughts may get up to 14 times worse than the ones in the historical period.
Increases in river flooding are most prevalent in north-western Europe, and are particularly worrying for the British Isles and several other European cities, which could observe more than a 50 per cent increase of their 10-year-high river flow.
Adapting cities to heat waves is complicated We know a lot about the benefits of adapting to flood risk.
In Southern Europe, adapting to some of the projected changes could only be achieved by a fundamental, and expensive, re-engineering of each city or water resource system, as significant adaptation to climate extremes has already been implemented and radical changes will be needed to achieve more.