January 24, 2025 - The Mediterranean region is experiencing increasingly severe weather patterns, with recent events highlighting the impact of climate change on rainfall and flooding. In October 2024, over 200 fatalities were reported in Valencia, Spain, following an unprecedented deluge that delivered five times the average monthly rainfall in just one week.
Scientists warn that climate change is not only intensifying the severity of storms in the Mediterranean but also increasing their frequency. The region is warming at a rate 20% faster than the global average, leading to more extreme precipitation events.
Areas that have historically experienced extreme rainfall are now facing even more intense downpours, contributing to a sense of a new normal for local populations. According to Leone Cavicchia, a researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, the intensity of these extreme precipitation events is expected to rise in the coming decades.
As air temperatures increase, so does the atmosphere's capacity to hold moisture, resulting in drier regions becoming even drier, while extreme rainfall events become more severe. The geographical features of the Mediterranean—steep mountains and dry riverbeds—further exacerbate the risk of sudden flooding.
Recent weather patterns have been influenced by the polar jet stream, which can form low-pressure systems known as cut-off depressions. Such systems have previously led to significant weather events, including the storm Boris in September 2023, which resulted in at least 24 deaths in Central and Southern Europe.
In 2023, a cut-off depression over Greece triggered storm Daniel, which intensified as it moved across the Mediterranean toward Libya, resulting in the collapse of two dams and approximately 13,200 fatalities.
Urbanization along coastal and floodplain areas in the Mediterranean has increased the risk of flooding, placing more individuals and properties in harm's way. Although improvements in flood protection structures and early warning systems have reduced mortality rates from flooding, the population in these vulnerable areas has more than doubled since the 1960s, with around 250 million people now residing in flood-prone river basins.