We've had a spot of rain. I appreciate that if you live in Scotland, a statement like this makes less than startling news. Actually it wouldn't merit mention even here in the sunblasted south-west of France, but for two factors: it was the first rain in more than a month, and the month was February. February has been as dry as tinder. It's really not meant to do that.
Nor is it just down here in the melanoma belt that the skies have been cloudless and the ground parched. According to the French met office, Meteo France, there was no rainfall of more than a millimetre a day (about the thickness of a cornflake, as they'd say on
The One Show) anywhere in mainland France for 32 days from 21 January.
Normally, at any season, you can expect weather conditions to be different depending on which side of the Loire you live (also, how close to the Alps or to the Atlantic). Not this winter. The picture has been eerily the same across the Hexagon, and indeed across much of southern Europe. February ended with drought alerts in place in more than half the French départments.
But then you know about this, or at least the essentials of it. You know that Scottish supermarket shelves have become increasingly bare of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, plums, peaches, pomegranates and melons, and that drought-attributed shortages are also emerging for some meat products. At this time of year, Britain customarily relies for most of its fruit and vegetables on the very European regions that are now so short of water.
What you may be less aware of is that the market stalls and supermarket shelves here in France are still piled high with abundant and magnificent fruits and vegetables. I can personally attest that the motorway which runs past Montpellier from Barcelona to Nice and Lyon was thunder-full of lorries these past two weekends, trucking the early-season Spanish produce to the tables of the Single Market. True, prices are going up and, in some cases, quality is suffering. The early plums this year are papery and tasteless, the oranges bland, and last autumn's figs were small and few. But there is plenty to go around. The drought may be happening here, but it is the consumers of Brexited Britain who are suffering most from its dietary effects.
I hear the voices of the Brexiteers protesting that you can't blame 23 June 2016 for climate change. Quite so, but you can blame it for producers and hauliers preferring to sell scarce products across invisible frontiers than marooning their lorries for hours on end at Channel ports while reams of customs documents are processed. Outside the Single Market and Schengen, Britain can expect to remain at the back of the queue for any trade favours. You can also blame Brexit at least in part for the shortage of migrant seasonal workers to harvest those products Britain does grow for itself.
None of which is to deny the terrifying realities of France's water shortage. This is the longest unbroken nationwide drouth since 2020, and then it was in spring, which is less exceptional. To find anything like this in winter, you'd need to go back beyond the start of systematic record-keeping, 60-odd years ago. Previous winter dry spells have maxed out at 22 days. It's also been colder: indeed, Montpellier saw snow (for a few minutes) last week for only the second time in a decade.
The consequences of a winter water shortage are both more adverse and more far-reaching than one might imagine. February/March is when plants waken from winter, and if there is insufficient water in the soil then the buds struggle to develop and the crops fail. This potentially affects not just consumer fruit and vegetables, but animal feedstocks and, of course, wine production.
Last year was the hottest on record in France, and the second driest. Rainfall across the year and the country was 25% less than usual. Since August 2021, every month bar three has recorded below-average rainfall. The water flow in major rivers like the Garonne is a third of the norm for this time of year. The
étangs (coastal lagoons) around Montpellier have barely refilled since last summer, and some of the sublime flamingos that feed in them have decamped for wetter places.
Ground water content for February is measuring at roughly the usual level… for August. The government body which considers emergency regulations to protect water supplies has never met so early in the year. Compensation for buildings damaged by extremes of weather has been upped by 15%, extra climate change money has been shovelled to the farmers, and a new national water plan has been drawn up, envisaging costly investment in wastewater reprocessing.
Cracks have started to appear in the walls and foundations of buildings, some of which have collapsed. Almost half of France's homes are built on chalky ground, which can become unstable under volatile moisture levels. Last summer brought record wildfire destruction. And France's self-congratulation at having shifted energy production away from fossil fuels and Russian gas has given way to a growing unease about how much water is needed to cool nuclear reactors.
So, I wish I could report that the crisis is now behind us. But it's not. When the first rain in a month did finally fall on the old streets of Montpellier it wasn't more than a spit of drizzle, lasting well under an hour. You wouldn't call it dramatic. There was no dash for umbrellas or waterproofs, though people in these parts tend to stay wrapped up anyway until the temperature is safely into the mid-20s. Everyone waited to see if it would do it again. It did, but not nearly enough.
When we first moved to Montpellier, people told us it was a terribly rainy city. Not after Edinburgh, it wasn't (
Charlie Ellis's description in
Scottish Review of the Water of Leith in spate awoke memories of the 30 years we lived by its banks in Colinton). When rain does fall here, it often takes the form of a torrential thunderstorm that machine-guns the town for 20 minutes, and then vanishes as abruptly as it arrived. This often happens, disconcertingly, when the summer furnace is at its hottest. When it does it can wreak a fair havoc, because the infrastructure is built in fond expectation of unbroken sunshine. Roads flood for lack of camber, drains choke, undredged rivers surge over their banks, gutters cascade and ceramic pavements turn into steamy skating rinks.
We had one or two of those last summer, but the 2023 thunderstorm season is a long way off. Besides, a splash or two of rain now will not go very far. Every statistic confirms a fundamental rather than a freaky change in weather patterns, and not only in a parched southern France. Winter rainfall deficits are at least as noteworthy in northern Italy, northern Spain, southern Germany, northern Greece, southern Bulgaria and Mediterranean Turkey. The EU's Copernicus Programme is mapping recurrent groundwater shortages across much of southern Europe.
We Brits have a lazy linguistic habit of referring to rain as bad weather and sunshine as good weather. The French don't do that – indeed, they usually don't bother to talk much about the weather at all. These past few years have been different. Right now, people in Montpellier are talking about how they hope to see some better weather soon. What they mean is more rain.
Keith Aitken is a journalist, writer and broadcaster
