Global warming has fueled an exceptional drought on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia, a new analysis finds.
Over the last year, severe heat and meager rainfall have desiccated farmland, with Sicilian wheat farms losing more than 50 percent of their harvest. Despite water rationing, reservoirs on both islands are nearly depleted.
“This is an unprecedented drought emergency,” Renato Schifani, governor of Sicily, said in an interview last month. “It is an extraordinary event born of climate change.”
The drought, among the most severe on record, has been made decidedly more intense by climate change, according to an analysis from World Weather Attribution. Experts find that warming also made the dry conditions 50 percent more likely, largely by giving rise to more extreme heat.
The high temperatures seen this year would have been “almost impossible” without human-caused climate change, authors write, adding, “Unless the world rapidly stops burning fossil fuels, these events will become even more common in the future.”
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