Rivers Shrink, Forests Burn, Animal Agriculture Continues

Europe is running out of water.

The Rhine has fallen to record lows. The Danube is so depleted that nuclear reactors have been forced to reduce output. Italy’s Po has reached historic lows. Wildfires are burning across Greece, France and the Netherlands. England and Wales have experienced their driest July in nearly 200 years. Meanwhile, British farmers are warning about food shortages.

This is what the climate crisis looks like. Not sometime in 2050. Not as a computer model showing what might happen if governments fail to act. Now. And while much of the discussion understandably focuses on fossil fuels, power generation and transport, another enormous contributor remains remarkably easy to ignore. Animal agriculture.

Rivers Are Disappearing

The Rhine is one of Europe’s busiest waterways, carrying cargo through several countries. At Kaub in Germany, navigable water depth recently fell to just 25cm, matching the record low set in 2018. Cargo vessels may now need to carry smaller loads, requiring more ships to move the same amount of material. Eventually, transporting goods can become economically unviable.

The Danube is causing even more dramatic problems. Record-low water levels have forced nuclear plants in Hungary and Romania to reduce production because they rely on the river for cooling.

Romania resorted to blowing up a rock with 180kg of explosives to redirect enough water towards its remaining nuclear reactor. A European country is literally reshaping the riverbed with explosives to keep electricity flowing. Hungary’s only nuclear power station, which normally produces almost half the country’s electricity, has been operating at less than half capacity. Serbia’s major hydroelectric plant has reportedly fallen to just 20% capacity. Two Romanian car factories have even halted production to reduce electricity demand.

The climate crisis is no longer simply an environmental story. It is becoming an energy story, a transport story, an economic story, and a food story.

Britain Is Drying Out Too

England and Wales have recorded their driest July since records began. Half of England is facing drought conditions after four heatwaves this year. Crops are struggling. Grass is dying. Farmers are demanding better access to water and investment in reservoirs. Vegetables requiring substantial water, including cucumbers and leafy greens, could become particularly vulnerable. Britain already produces only around half of its vegetables and roughly one-sixth of its fruit. That leaves us exposed not only to drought here, but to climate shocks elsewhere.

Spain and North Africa have already experienced weather-related disruption affecting produce imported into Britain. And this is happening while food prices remain a serious concern for millions of households.

Climate change does not need to make food disappear completely to hurt people. A failed harvest somewhere else can become a higher supermarket bill here.

Then Everything Burns

Across Greece, more than 1,000 people have been evacuated as wildfires spread through heat-baked landscapes. More than 250 people had to be rescued from beaches. Two helicopter crew members died while fighting the fires.

France has experienced its largest wildfire on record, burning around 420 square kilometres and forcing more than 224,000 people to flee. A separate fire in Provence required around 1,500 firefighters.

The Netherlands has also been battling forest fires. Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, heating at more than twice the global average since the 1980s. Higher temperatures increase evaporation. Vegetation dries. Soil loses moisture. Rivers shrink. Fires spread more easily.

Where Is Animal Agriculture?

Food production is not merely suffering from climate change. Parts of the food system are helping create it. One peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Research Letters argues that conventional greenhouse gas accounting significantly understates the contribution of land use and agriculture to present-day warming. Using gross accounting for land-use emissions, effective radiative forcing rather than conventional 100-year global warming potentials, and including both warming and cooling emissions, the analysis estimated that agriculture was responsible for around 60% of effective radiative forcing since 1750.

The authors estimated agriculture had caused around 0.74°C of net warming between 1750 and 2020, with approximately 86% of that attributed to animal agriculture. These are not conventional accounting figures, and the study acknowledges substantial uncertainties, particularly around aerosol cooling. Its conclusions depend on the alternative accounting methods being proposed. But its argument deserves attention.

We have spent decades treating historical deforestation differently from fossil carbon, despite the carbon released from destroyed forests continuing to contribute to warming. Animal agriculture occupies vast amounts of land. Forests have been cleared for grazing and animal feed. Methane is continually released by cows and other ruminants. The land itself represents an enormous lost opportunity to restore vegetation and remove carbon from the atmosphere. The study estimates that land currently used for animal agriculture has potential to store around 540 gigatonnes of CO2 through restored vegetation.

Animal Agriculture’s Climate Trap

We can already see the absurdity unfolding on British farms. Cows on dairy farms are struggling during heatwaves. Milk production has reportedly fallen by around 20% on some farms.

Grass is drying out. Winter feed is being used during summer. Farmers are installing industrial fans and spraying cows with water to stop them overheating.

Breed millions of methane-producing animals. Use enormous areas of land to feed them. Contribute to a warming climate. Experience increasingly severe drought and heat. Then use additional water and energy to maintain production through the conditions that animal agriculture helped intensify. This is being described as adaptation. It looks increasingly like life support for an unsustainable system.

We Have Another Option

None of this means fossil fuels suddenly stop mattering. The 2025 study explicitly states that quitting fossil fuels remains urgent. We need to stop pretending climate policy is solely about fossil fuels.

Europe is watching rivers retreat, crops struggle, forests burn and power stations lose access to cooling water. And our response cannot simply be to build more reservoirs, install more fans and find increasingly elaborate ways to preserve every existing industry. Adaptation is necessary.

But so is stopping the damage.

When an industry uses enormous amounts of land, produces powerful greenhouse gases, contributes to deforestation and then requires even more resources to survive the climate it helped create, perhaps resilience is the wrong goal. The goal should be replacing it. We already know how to produce food without breeding billions of animals into existence. Europe does not need better ways to keep animal agriculture running on a hotter planet. To have a cooler planet for everyone we need animals liberated from agriculture.