Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, with extreme weather causing excess deaths and economic disruption.
Many nations in the region in 2022 had their warmest year on record but the expanded use of renewable energy provides a silver lining, according to a report issued last week by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Extreme heat, drought and wildfire, marine heatwaves and unprecedented glacier melt shows that decades of accelerated heating has had far-reaching impacts on the region’s socio-economic fabric and ecosystems, the report said.
Europe in 2022was approximately 2.3°C above the pre-industrial average used as a baseline for the Paris Agreement.
Climate change is taking a major human, economic and environmental toll, the report said.
“Summer was the hottest ever recorded: the high temperatures exacerbated the severe and widespread drought conditions, fueled violent wildfires that resulted in the second largest burnt area on record, and led to thousands of heat-associated excess deaths,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom had their warmest year on record last year and the summer in Europe was the hottest ever recorded.
The 2022 annual average temperature for Europe was between the second and fourth highest on record, with an anomaly of about 0.79 °C above the 1991–2020 average.
With precipitation below average across much of the region in 2022, France had its driest January to September, and the United Kingdom had its driest January to August since 1976, with far-reaching consequences for agriculture and energy production.
Spain’s water reserves decreased to 41.9 percent of total capacity by on July 26, with even lower capacity in some basins.
Glaciers in Europe lost about 880 cubic kilometers of ice from 1997 to 2022.
The Alps were worst affected, with an average reduction in ice thickness of 34 meters. In 2022, glaciers in the Alps experienced a new record loss of mass in a single year, triggered by low winter snowfall, an extremely warm summer and dust deposits from the Sahara.
The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet contributed around 14.9 mm to global mean sea-level rise. And according to scientific assessments, it continued to lose mass during 2022, said the WMO report.
Average sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic were the warmest on record and large portions of the region’s seas were affected by powerful marine heatwaves. The rates of surface ocean warming, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the southern Arctic, were more than three times the global average.
The record-breaking heat stress that Europeans experienced last year was one of the main drivers of weather-related excess deaths.
Based on information in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), meteorological, hydrological and climate-related hazards in Europe in 2022 resulted in 16,365 reported fatalities and directly affected 156, 000 people. UN News
The co-authors of the report warned of more distress to come, as the alarming figures “cannot be considered a one-off occurrence or an oddity of the climate.”
“Our current understanding of the climate system and its evolution informs us that these kinds of events are part of a pattern that will make heat stress extremes more frequent and more intense across the region,” said Dr Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The report also highlights the implications of Europe’s extreme weather patterns for the supply, demand and infrastructure of Europe’s energy system.
But, in a sign of hope for the future, renewable energy generated more electricity than natural gas last year. Wind and solar power generated 22.3 percent of European Union’s electricity in 2022, while natural gas accounted for 20 percent.
“For the first time, more electricity was generated by wind and solar than by fossil gas in the EU. Increasing use of renewables and low-carbon energy sources is crucial to reduce dependence on fossil fuels,” said Taalas. UN News