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Weeks of Drought they have turned many of the main ones into streams European waterwaysharming the German industry and energy sector that they rely on shipments by ship to send and receive materials. In particular, the water level of the Rhine could drop to a critical point in the coming days, making it nearly impossible to use the river to transport goods such as coal and gasoline.
The whole European Union is grappling with effects of the climate crisis, with increasingly long and intense periods of drought, reductions in watercourses and increasingly severe and frequent heat waves. In addition to the damage to the agricultural sector, the low water levels also represent a problem for the German industry, where, according to Capital Economicsthe transport of goods by rivers is of greater importance than in other Western European countries.
The German authorities predict that the water level of the Rhine, in the Kaub bottleneck, they will drop below the 40 centimeter mark at the beginning of Friday, August 12, 2022 and will continue to decline over the weekend. Although the level is still above the all-time low of 27 centimeters recorded in October 2018, many large ships may find it difficult to safely cross the river at that point, located roughly in the middle of the Rhine between Koblenz and Mainz.
“We hope that the transport by ship will not be interrupted, but already in 2018 we experienced a similar situation and, due to the drought, the ships were no longer able to go up the Rhine for many weeks” he told theAssociated Press Christian Lorenz, spokesman for the German logistics company HGK. Authorities are already taking steps to address a possible outage, moving more freight traffic on the rail network and getting ready to move all river traffic by rail.
However, these operations are very expensive and will take a long time to become fully operational, said ad Associated Press Andrew Kenningham, Chief Economist for Europe at Capital Economics. Therefore, the Rhine problems could contribute to reducing German and European economic growth, if they were to continue until December, further increasing inflation and causing industrial production to drop slightlyKenningham continued.
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