Characterizing France’s plausible future droughts: a spatiotemporal framework

Droughts have severely impacted France across multiple socio-economic sectors (agriculture, energy, forestry), with climate change projected to aggravate these events. To construct tangible assessments of future drought risks, we develop a comprehensive framework analyzing meteorological, soil moisture, and hydrological droughts across short-term and long-term timescales. Our analysis uses a recent ensemble of high-resolution hydro-climate simulations (1960–2100) and treats droughts as contiguous spatiotemporal events. Three historical events (in 1976, 1989 and 2015) included in the 1958–2020baseline historical run serve as references for quantifying the projected changes. We analyze drought evolution by focusing on three characteristics: duration, spatial extent and intensity. We examine whether these characteristics exhibit significant trends for the RCP8.5 scenario, how their distributions for different global warming levels (+ 1.5∘ C, + 2∘ C, + 3∘ C) evolve, and how drought conditions unfold in two contrasting hydro-climate storylines (wetting and drying). All drought types exhibit a significant intensity increase, with current benchmark intensities becoming more frequent even under + 1.5∘ C warming. At + 3∘ C warming, 7–9% of soil moisture and hydrological drought events exceed the exceptional duration of the 1989 event. Notably, even the wetting storyline does not show significant drought alleviation, while the drying one generates unprecedented drought conditions. As a result, adaptation planning should take into account the increased frequency of historical benchmarks, but also drought conditions exceeding them. Our analysis also highlights the sensitivity of future drought projections to how well models represent key driving factors: evolving aerosol concentrations and vegetation physiological responses to increasing CO₂ .