U.N. says climate change to hit southern Europe hard

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Southern Europe will suffer more than the north from climate change, with farmers there struggling to keep crops alive because of lack of rain, U.N. experts said on Wednesday.

Although countries in the north will have milder winters and warmer summers, they will also face much more frequent flooding and erosion of their coasts, according to a detailed scientific report on the continent's climatic future.

The United Nations environmental agency UNEP said the report "finds that Europe's sensitivity to future climate change has a distinct north-south gradient ... that southern Europe will be more severely affected than northern Europe."

The report, part of a gloomy global U.N. outlook issued in Brussels last Friday, said: "Climate change is likely to magnify regional differences of Europe's natural resources and assets."

Crop productivity, if current trends to global warming continue unabated, "is likely to increase in northern Europe and decrease along the Mediterranean and in south-eastern Europe," the document declared.

Shortages of water, largely due to much drier summers and disappearance of glaciers feeding south-running rivers, will bedevil southern Europe, with its already semi-arid climate, threatening farms and forests.

"Agriculture will have to cope with increasing water demand for irrigation in southern Europe," it said.

The global report, from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the speed of global warming -- widely seen as largely a product of human activity -- threatened disaster to wide areas of the world, especially poorer states.