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Drought impact on ecosystems in Europe, 2000-2022

Dashboard (Tableau)
Prod-ID: DAS-275-en
Published 26 Oct 2021
1 min read
Monitoring meteorological drought impacts supports policy measures that target, among others, greenhouse gas removals and the adaptation of ecosystems to climate change. In 2022, Europe experienced its hottest summer and second warmest year on record, and consequently the largest overall drought impacted area: over 630,000km2 as opposed to the 167,000km2 annual average impacted area between 2000 and 2022. Between 2000 and 2022 there is an increasing trend in drought-impacted areas in the EU. Drought impacts may increase further if global mitigation and EU and national adaptation strategies are not effectively implemented.

More information

Access the soil moisture dataset here:

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/soil-moisture-deficit-during-the 

Access the vegetation productivity dataset here:

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/annual-above-ground-vegetation-productivity 

Standardized anomalies of yearly vegetation productivity during 2000-2021 are analyzed in areas with strong drought pressure measured as precipitation shortages and low soil moisture content.

Anomalies are expressed in standard deviations compared to the long term average vegetation productivity conditions for each 500m grid cell in the EEA39 region. Negative vegetation productivity anomalies indicate vegetation productivity conditions that are less than the long term normal condition due to drought (i.e. under negative sol moisture anomalies).

The extent of the impacted area is calculated from the sum of those grid cells where the soil moisture anomaly was below -1 standard deviation and the vegetation productivity anomaly was below -0,5 standard deviation in the given year.

In order to exclude low vegetation anomaly signals in the time series, only those grid cells were considered in this analysis where the Corine Land Cover (CLC) 2000-2018 series indicated no land use change between 2000-2018.

Related content

Based on data

Data Soil moisture deficit during the vegetation growing season, annual time-series, 2000-2019 The dataset consists of a collection of annual soil moisture (SM) anomalies during the vegetation growing season (GS) for the years 2000-2019 across EEA 38 area and the United Kingdom. The vegetation growing season is defined by EEA´s phenology data series "Vegetation growing season length 2000-2016" [https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/annual-above-ground-vegetation-season]. The anomalies are calculated based on the European Commission's Joint Research Centre European Drought Observatory (EDO) Soil Moisture Index (SMI) with respect to the 1995–2019 base period. The yearly start and end of GS periods are dynamic and calculated according to the EEA Phenology Indicators. A positive anomaly indicates that the observed SM was wetter than the long-term SM average for the base period, while a negative anomaly indicates that the observed SM was drier than the reference value. Because SM anomalies are measured in units of standard deviation from the long-term SMI average, they can be used to compare annual deficits/surplus of SM between geographic regions. EDO is one of the early warning and monitoring systems of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. As the dataset builds on EDO's SMI, it therefore contains modified Copernicus Emergency Management Service information (2019).

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For references, please go to https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/data-viewers/drought-impact-on-ecosystems-in or scan the QR code.

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