Poppy growing in Sicily. Marco via Flickr
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.”
Sicily in January 2023 and January 2024, after a drought had set in. ESA
An analysis from World Weather Attribution finds that warming made the dry conditions seen over the past year 50 percent more likely, largely by giving rise to more extreme heat.
Excessive heat recorded in Sardinia and Sicily 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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