Romania is facing the worst drought in the last 150 years when weather records began and it looks set to continue a top meteorologist says.
“Unfortunately, the drought that has gone on for 43 months is continuing,” said Monica Ioniță, a climatology researcher in Germany, in an interview with HotNews, speaking at the presentation of the State of the Climate report.
She said the effects are already being seen, while climate projections do not offer good news.
“It’s not over,” says Monica Ioniță, author of two chapters of the State of the Climate report, released by InfoClima.ro which refers to a drought that began in March 2022.
“If we don’t have more than the average rainfall in the next three to four months and it doesn’t snow this winter, in spring we find ourselves facing the same problems for agriculture,” she said. She is a researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the German city of Bremerhaven.
“It should rain lightly and steadily”
Monica Ioniță stressed that it is not enough for there to be above average rain for the next few months, but “it should rain as it rained 20-30 years ago, that is, lightly and steadily, not to rain heavily as it did in Bucharest recently, when the rain for one day was the amount needed for a month”.
August 2024 was the peak of the drought in Romania as well as in much of Eastern Europe she said. Starting from March 2025 there has been a drought in Western Europe, a region where it generally rains a lot in spring.
There is another problem with the prolonged drought: any rain in the summer season evaporates instantly and the soil does not have time to recover.
What the future looks like according to climate projections
The way precipitation is distributed is becoming increasingly chaotic, according to climate analyses
While summers see less rain and accentuate drought conditions there are short torrential rains in the autumn, with extreme volumes in a short period (over 200 l/sqm in 24 hours, in
The alternation between a rain deficit and heavy rain leads to a double risk: chronic drought and local flooding.
And climate projections suggest that these trends will be amplified in the future: summer months wilk become drier, with drought episodes more and more frequent, and the distribution of rainfall will continue to be uneven.
Droughts are not only becoming longer, but also more severe.
The most recent drought in Romania lasted 30 months
The most recent prolonged severe drought ended in March 2021, starting in October 2018.
The first signs of the drought appeared in Transylvania in May 2018, and in the autumn, the drought shifted to Oltenia in the south.
Drought intensified in 2020, with a rain deficit of 62%, mainly affecting the southern and eastern regions. Autumn crops were compromised in Moldova and Dobrogea on the east, and half of the harvest crop was lost in some places.
Drought has cost Romanian farmers 1.5-1.8 billion euros, farmers association says
