A severe drought is tightening its grip across much of Europe, disrupting agriculture, straining water supplies and fuelling a wave of wildfires from Spain to Italy and France. Meteorological data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service show Europe is warming faster than any other continent, and the consequences are now playing out visibly across the continent's farms, rivers and forests.

In northern Italy, the Po — the country's longest river, which drains the fertile agricultural plain stretching from the Alps to the Adriatic — has fallen to levels approaching or exceeding records set during the severe drought of 2022. Around Turin, the river has been reduced to a slow-moving, algae-covered channel, and municipal crews are using excavators mounted on barges to clear dense invasive aquatic plants. Near Pavia, large stretches of riverbed lie exposed. The river's flow through Turin has dropped by more than half since June, with discharge at one downstream monitoring station at times falling to roughly a quarter of normal levels. More than 100 municipalities in the northern regions of Piedmont and Lombardy are now receiving water by tanker. Farmers in the rice-growing Lomellina area and the fruit and vegetable heartland around Parma, sometimes called the Food Valley, warn that the situation could worsen significantly without rainfall, forcing greater reliance on groundwater and emergency measures.

In France, 67 of the country's departments have been placed in a drought crisis situation, according to the agriculture ministry, which has announced an emergency plan offering financial compensation and regulatory relief to affected farmers. The country's largest agricultural union, the FNSEA, estimates losses running into the billions of euros. Vegetable growers describe watching harvests shrivel before their eyes: carrots are growing thin and unsellable, driven deep into the soil in search of moisture, while beetroot and lettuce crops have largely failed. The industry group Interfel expects vegetable and fruit prices to rise by between 5 and 30 percent. Farmers working 16-hour days to irrigate their fields warn that neither the government nor the public fully grasps the scale of what is coming.