Hundreds of fires are burning across the Mediterranean, displacing thousands and causing irreparable damage as human-made climate change causes record-breaking summer heatwaves.
- With very high temperatures expected in parts of Spain and France on Friday and Saturday, the crisis threatens to spread with weeks of scorching summer weather still to come across the region.
- In Greece, firefighters continued to battle what the Prime Minister Kyriako Mitsotakis described on Thursday as the country’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades”. Greece’s most severe heatwave in decades has fanned blazes that have destroyed more than 100,000 hectares of forests and farmland.
- The fires have left three dead, hundreds homeless, forced thousands to flee, and caused economic and environmental devastation. Mitsotakis said that 150 homes have been destroyed in greater Athens over the last week, while the number id still rising on the island of Evia, which accounts for more than half of the area burned nationwide
- Although recent rain has eased the crisis in Greece, it is just one of a number of Mediterranean countries that have been hit by a savage fire season. Now, the Mediterranean heatwave has started to shift west, with three wildfires raging in Spain on Thursday, and temperatures soaring above 40C in the country on Friday and Saturday, as well as in many parts of the south of France.
- Two smaller fires were burning in the northern wine-producing region of La Rioja and another north-eastern province, Zaragoza, which involved two planes.
- Portuguese prime minister, Antonio Costa, urged people to avoid “risky behaviors” which could cause wildfires. “We know that the next few days are going to be difficult,” he told reporters on Thursday during a visit to a civil protection headquarters. “We are facing a permanent challenge that is the result of climate change,” he added. Like southern Europe, North Africa has been sweltering under searing heat.
European countries have sent firefighting planes to Algeria to help fight wildfires there that killed at least 69 people through the mountainous Berber region. The victims of the blazes include at least 28 soldiers who were deployed to fight the fires, according to authorities.
