Early autumn leaves in Netherlands due to ongoing drought
If you’re thinking it's too early for the trees to change color and lose their leaves, you’re not wrong. The Netherlands is experiencing a “false autumn” this summer due to the ongoing drought. Trees are already shedding their leaves and fruit as a survival tactic, NOS reports after speaking with climate scientists and a tree expert.
After last week’s hot and dry days, many places in the Netherlands got little to no rain this week. As a result, the precipitation deficit is widening again. Despite the brief period of showers in mid-July, the deficit is once again higher than in the driest 5 percent of years.
“We only really expect it to be as dry as it is now once every twenty years,” climate scientist Karin van der Wiel of the meteorological institute KNMI told the broadcaster. “But if you look at recent years, you see that it’s quite different. It was also incredibly dry in 2018 and in 2022. So it’s happening more often. It’s striking that recent years have seen a series of extremes: it’s either very dry or very wet.”
“This is in line with what we expect from climate change in our region,” Van der Wiel said. “This will manifest itself in the Netherlands with drier summers, with less precipitation and more evaporation. The question now is whether it’s happening faster than we expect. That’s difficult to say.”
The Netherlands has had two heat waves so far this summer, and a dry spring preceded it. “Those dry spells are coming too quickly one af the other,” Ronald Loch, a tree expert who advises the municipality of Rotterdam, told NOS. “A tree doesn’t really have a chance to recover. If there’s another wet spell, you just hope its moisture balance can be restored.”
But it is too soon to panic about the early autumn, Loch said. Shedding leaves is part of a tree’s process. “That’s a strategy too. Just let those leaves fall a little, and with whatever is left, I can carry on,” he said, speaking for a large plane tree beside him. “Next year, I’ll have a nice flush of leaves again.”
