Summary/Abstract
Between June and August of 2022, heat waves and droughts across the northern hemisphere led to soil moisture droughts, which caused poor harvests in the affected regions, increased fire risk, and are expected to threaten food security across the world.
On October 5, 2022, a team of scientists from Switzerland, India, the Netherlands, France, the United States of America and the United Kingdom published an event study investigating the role of climate change in the frequency and magnitude of low soil moisture during June-August 2022.
Synthesizing model and observation-driven data, the study concluded that human-induced climate
change has increased the probability of the summer 2022 soil moisture drought both in West-Central
Europe and in the nontropical Northern Hemisphere, making both root zone and surface soil drought significantly more likely, with high variance depending on the region. The event study further concluded that the extreme and prolonged northern hemisphere temperatures that exacerbated agricultural droughts “would have been virtually impossible without climate change.”