Romania is going through the worst period of drought in modern history and “it's not over”. What does this mean for the future?

In the last 150 years, Romania has not faced such a prolonged drought, according to data from the State of the Climate report. “Unfortunately, the drought continues and we are at 43 months,” said Monica Ioniță, a researcher in the field of climatology, in Germany, in a dialogue with HotNews, at the presentation of the State of the Climate report. The effects are already visible, while climate projections do not bring good news.

“It's not over,” says Monica Ioniță, author of two chapters in the State of the Climate report, launched by InfoClima.ro. It refers to the drought that started in March 2022 and continues.

“If it doesn't rain above average in the next three to four months and if we don't have snow in the winter, we will wake up with the same problems for agriculture in the spring,” says the researcher from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, in the German city of Bremerhaven.

“It should rain light and slow”

Monica Ioniță emphasized that it is not enough to rain more than the average for a few months in a row, but “it should rain as it rained 20-30 years ago, that is, little and slowly, not as it rained in Bucharest recently, in a day as in a month”.

She states that August 2024 was the peak of this drought in Romania. The researcher points out that all of Eastern Europe has been affected, and from March 2025 there is also a drought in Western Europe, a rare fact in an area where spring rains a lot, the researcher also said.

There is another problem with 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 distribution of precipitation is becoming more chaotic, climate analysis shows.

While the summers bring less rain and accentuate the drought, the autumn episodes bring short torrential rains, with extreme accumulations in short intervals (over 200 l/m2 in 24 hours, in Dobrogea, at the end of August 2024), writes in the chapter on drought, in the State of the Climate report.

This alternation between scarcity and heavy rains leads to a double risk: chronic drought and localized flooding.

And climate projections suggest that the future will amplify these trends: summers tend to become drier, with increasingly frequent droughts, and rainfall distribution will continue to be uneven.

In addition, droughts are not only becoming longer, but also more severe.

The most recent drought in Romania lasted 30 months

The most recent severe prolonged drought ended in March 2021, having started in October 2018.

The first signs of that drought appeared in Transylvania in May 2018, and in autumn, the drought was also felt in Oltenia.

The drought intensified in 2020, with a water deficit of 62%, mainly affecting the southern and eastern regions. Autumn crops were compromised in important regions of Moldova and Dobrogea, and there were cases where half of the production was lost. May 2020 was the peak.