Climate change was responsible for the floods across Europe which killed 220 people earlier this summer says a new report.

The extreme rain brought flooding to Germany and Belgium and now researchers from the World Weather Attribution group have said that global heating made heavy rainfall which caused such devastation nine times more likely. According to the WWA analysis, heavy downpours are up to 19 per cent more intense due to human factors contributing to climate change.

“These floods have shown us that even developed countries are not safe from severe impacts of extreme weather that we have seen and known to get worse with climate change. This is an urgent global challenge and we need to step up to it. The science is clear and has been for years,” said Dr Friederike Otto, Associate Director Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, co-lead of the World Weather Attribution group and an IPCC lead author.

Whilst the floods in Europe hit Germany and Belgium hardest, the WWA group looked at nations right across Western Europe, with researchers, scientists, universities and meteorological agencies all combining to produce the study.

“We combined the knowledge of specialists from several fields of study to understand the influence of climate change on the terrible flooding last month, and to make clear what we can and can not analyse in this event. It is difficult to analyse the climate change influence on heavy rainfall at very local levels, but we were able to show that, in Western Europe, greenhouse gas emissions have made events like these more likely,” said Dr Sjoukje Philip, Climate Researcher, Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI).