STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Swedes in a wide area around the capital Stockholm have been told by authorities to save water after an unusually warm summer pushed temperatures across Scandinavia to record levels.
Stockholm’s city authorities said high water temperatures in Lake Malaren – a source of drinking water for two million people – had reduced the amount of tap water the region can produce.
Residents of the capital and surrounding areas have been told to cut down on shower time, not to fill swimming pools and to stop watering gardens and cleaning cars – unusual advice in a country known for its lakes and water.
“Every drop counts,” Stockholm Water and Waste said in a statement.
Europe sweltered under a heatwave for much of July with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius in some parts of the continent, causing wildfires and hundreds of deaths. Scientists warn such events are becoming more frequent and more intense due to global warming.
“We have had big changes in Sweden’s climate,” Erik Kjellstrom, Professor of Climatology at Sweden’s Meteorological and Hydrological Institute said.
“Winters have become shorter and much milder and we can see that summers have become longer and warmer in general.”
July was the warmest month for 100 years in parts of Sweden, with the far north worst affected.
Jokkmokk – just north of the Arctic Circle – registered 15 days in a row of daytime temperatures over 25 degrees Celsius, according to the institute.
Norway’s capital Oslo has also struggled to fill its reservoirs due to lower than normal precipitation this year, and has asked inhabitants since late July to voluntarily limit their water consumption, a spokesperson for the city’s water authority said.
In Finland’s Ylitornio, near the Santa Claus Village in Rovaniemi, maximum temperatures stayed above 25° degrees for 26 days in a row.
“Based on the available evidence we conclude that similar events are at least ten times more likely to occur now than they would have been in a preindustrial climate without human-caused warming,” said a study published this week on the recent extreme heatwave in Scandinavia by climate research group World Weather Attribution.
According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the average global surface air temperature reached 16.68 degrees Celsius in July, which is 0.45 degrees above the 1991-2020 average for the month.
(Reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm and Terje Solsvik in Oslo; editing by Christina Fincher)
