A heat wave in southern Europe, fed by strong hot winds from North Africa, has contributed to the outbreak of wildfires across the Mediterranean, including in Italy, Greece, Spain and Turkey. Firefighters in Italy have been deployed from all regions to battle blazes raging in many areas of the country, destroying thousands of hectares of forests.
Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes, some have lost their lives fighting the wildfires and the tourism sector in these areas was further put on their knees as the COVID-19 pandemic left its toil on business over the past year.
Greece
The Mediterranean nation is broiling under one of its worst heat waves in decades and firefighters continue to battle blazes across the country.
Until now, across Greece, wildfires have burned more than 263,000 hectares (650,000 acres) of land – in Evia, Athens and Lakonia, according to the Copernicus Environmental Satellite Sentinel-2.
Farms and livestock have vanished in an instant as several fronts gather pace, feeding on dense pine forests.
To find safe ground, Evia locals have escaped on ferries and the private and fishing boats that came to help rescue efforts.
The fires, described as nightmarish and apocalyptic, have also killed at least one person and hospitalised many more.
The fires come as Greece witnesses one of the worst heat waves on record, with temperatures as high as 47C (117F) lasting for more than a week.
Italy
Authorities deployed thousands of firefighters and water-dropping planes from across Italy, but due to the scale of the fires, the EU has also had to send in resources.
In Sardinia, 20,000 hectares of forests were destroyed, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate. The fires damaged farmland and livestock, businesses and homes, and there is concern about losses to the island’s biodiversity.
Christian Solinas, president of the Sardinia region, calls the fires an “unprecedented disaster.” Residents spoke of apocalyptic scenes.
In Sicily, fires are still raging in different areas with the flames having also reached the southern city of Catania on the eastern coast. Here, too, many residents were forced to leave their homes and police had to intervene by sea to save some 200 people stranded at beach resorts because of the fires and heavy smoke. Catania airport had to temporarily close due to the smoke.
Also hard hit is the region of Abruzzo, where flames devoured a pine forest in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, sending tourists and residents to the hospital after inhaling smoke.
Turkey
In Turkey, a key metric of fire intensity - the "fire radiative power", which measures energy produced from burning trees and other matter - reached the highest daily values since data records began in 2003.
Plumes of smoke from fires in southern Turkey were clearly visible in satellite images of the region, and the severe scale of the fires had caused high levels of particulate matter pollution over the Eastern Mediterranean area, CAMS said.
Persistent exposure to particulate matter pollution is associated with cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer.
Climate scientists warn
Climate scientists warned that human activity had changed the Earth’s climate in ways “unprecedented” in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, with some of the changes now inevitable and “irreversible”.
Within the next two decades, temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and bringing widespread devastation and extreme weather.
Only rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases in this decade can prevent such climate breakdown, with every fraction of a degree of further heating likely to compound the accelerating effects, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science.
Impact of the mediterranean wildfires on Egypt
The Meteorological Authority commented, in a statement, today, Thursday, on the news of the international newspapers that spread under the title "The Mediterranean is burning"... due to a long-term heat wave that began late last month, the like of which Europe has not seen since 198.
This wave also affected the Arab Republic of Egypt, where the temperature today in Cairo reached 43 degrees, according to the recordings of the monitoring stations.
However, due to the passage of the hot mass over the Mediterranean, the temperature decreases slightly and bears large amounts of moisture, which increases the sense of temperature.
This atmosphere will continue in the coming days, but at the beginning of the week the temperature drops a little and then rises again, and it has not been clear on the maps so far any significant decrease in temperatures.