As a direct consequence of extreme monsoon rainfall throughout the summer 2022 season Pakistan experienced the worst flooding in its history. We employ a probabilistic event attribution methodology as well as a detailed assessment of the dynamics to understand the role of climate change in this event. Many of the available state-of-the-art climate models struggle to simulate these rainfall characteristics. Those that pass our evaluation test generally show a much smaller change in likelihood and intensity of extreme rainfall than the trend we found in the observations. This discrepancy suggests that long-term variability, or processes that our evaluation may not capture, can play an important role, rendering it infeasible to quantify the overall role of human-induced climate change. However, the majority of models and observations we have analysed show that intense rainfall has become heavier as Pakistan has warmed. Some of these models suggest climate change could have increased the rainfall intensity up to 50%. The devastating impacts were also driven by the proximity of human settlements, infrastructure (homes, buildings, bridges), and agricultural land to flood plains, inadequate infrastructure, limited ex-ante risk reduction capacity, an outdated river management system, underlying vulnerabilities driven by high poverty rates and socioeconomic factors (e.g. gender, age, income, and education), and ongoing political and economic instability. Both current conditions and the potential further increase in extreme peaks in rainfall over Pakistan in light of anthropogenic climate change, highlight the urgent need to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather in Pakistan.

Abstract. In the 2022 summer, West-Central Europe and several other northern-hemisphere mid-latitude regions experienced substantial soil moisture deficits in the wake of precipitation shortages and elevated temperatures. Much of Europe has not witnessed a more severe soil drought since at least the mid-20th century, raising the question whether this is a manifestation of our warming climate. Here, we employ a well-established statistical approach to attribute the low 2022 summer soil moisture to human-induced climate change, using observation-driven soil moisture estimates and climate models. We find that in West-Central Europe, a June–August root-zone soil moisture drought such as in 2022 is expected to occur once in 20 years in the present climate, but would have occurred only about once per century during pre-industrial times. The entire northern extratropics show an even stronger global warming imprint with a 20-fold soil drought probability increase or higher, but we note that the underlying uncertainty is large. Reasons are manifold, but include the lack of direct soil moisture observations at the required spatiotemporal scales, the limitations of remotely sensed estimates, and the resulting need to simulate soil moisture with land surface models driven by meteorological data. Nevertheless, observation-based products indicate long-term declining summer soil moisture for both regions, and this tendency is likely fueled by regional warming, while no clear trends emerge for precipitation. Finally, our climate model analysis suggests that in a 2 °C world, 2022-like soil drought conditions would become twice as likely for West-Central Europe compared to today, and would take place nearly every year across the northern extratropics.

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Crop loss and ensuing social crises can be detrimental for the agriculture-driven economy of India. Though some studies identify country-wide increasing temperatures as the dominant factor for crop loss, the agro-climatic diversity within the country necessitates an understanding of the influence of climate variability on yields at regional scales. We report a complex interplay among rainfall, temperature and cropping choices, with a focus on the drought-prone Marathwada region in Maharashtra. Our analysis based on observations, as well as statistical and process-based modelling experiments, and temperature projections of 1.5 °C and 2 °C warmer worlds show that for the two major cropping seasons, rainfall deficit is the primary cause of crop failure, as compared to rising temperatures. The gradual shift from drought-resilient food crops, such as sorghum and pearl-millet to water-intensive cash crops such as sugarcane in recent years, is seemingly responsible for aggravating this crisis. Our findings warrant strategies promoting drought-resilient food crops, that will be useful, not only for mitigating the immediate agrarian crisis, but also for curbing impending threats to food security in the region under future climate change.

India is among the leading producers and consumers of wheat. The wheat-growing belt in the country is located along the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP; 21°35′-32°28′N and 73°50′-89°49′E) comprising of the states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. In recent years, wheat cultivation in India is increasingly prone to loss, driven by high temperatures due to climate change and variability (Lavania, 2021; Tribune News Service, 2021). This is a major concern given the observed and projected changes in statistics of the past and future extreme temperatures in India (Basha et al., 2017). Shortfalls in national wheat productivity is expected to have cascading implications for trade and food security (Halarnkar, 2014). The mechanisms through which rising temperatures affect wheat yields in the region are well-established (Farooq et al.