A fire devastates the area around Gouveia in Serra da Estrela National Park in Portugal on August 18, 2022. JOAO HENRIQUES v AP
It was more than 48°C on Thursday, August 18, in El Tarf, Guelma and Souk Ahras, three towns in Algeria plagued by fires with an already heavy preliminary toll. They caused the deaths of thirty-eight people, injured more than 200, resulted in the evacuation of hundreds of families and a hospital. Around 1,700 firefighters are deployed there to try to extinguish 24 forest fires.
Meanwhile, a little further north, Corsica was hit by violent storms, killing at least five people and injuring about twenty others, including four very seriously. Most of them fell victim to extraordinary gusts of wind – up to 224 km/h on the west coast of the island – that uprooted trees and roofs, caused power outages for 35,000 residents, littered the streets with branches and destroyed the anchorages of boats.
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Extreme storm on the one hand, drought on the other: the coasts of the Mediterranean are experiencing two facets of the same scourge: climate change. But that’s even faster on average than in the rest of the world. In the Mediterranean, the average temperature rose by 0.036°C per year between 1993 and 2020, or a total of almost 1°C, according to data from the European earth observation program Copernicus.
The effects of this development are clearly noticeable this summer. In the west, Spain and Portugal are being hit by forest fires. Morocco is facing what is likely to be its worst drought in forty years; its dams are three quarters empty: together their filling rate is no more than 27%. To the east, the desert encroaches into Iraq, where the combined flow of the Euphrates and Tigris has halved in two decades.
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While climate change does not explain all these phenomena, it is in fact responsible for the heat waves, which are multiplying even at sea: temperatures of 6.5°C above the seasonal norm have been recorded between the French, Spanish and Italian coasts, and very significant temperature anomalies have lasted at least seventy days in a row this summer. In the first twenty meters below the surface, the water reached 28°C off Marseille, 30°C in Bastia and the Balearic Islands. These marine heatwaves have devastating effects on wildlife and their habitats: corals, posidonia meadows, etc.
The Mediterranean Sea, one of the hotspots on earth
In 2020 an extensive body of knowledge was published on climate and environmental changes in the Mediterranean region, a geographical area generally divided between the three adjacent continents. It is the result of several years of research by 190 scientists from 25 countries, supported by the Union for the Mediterranean (UPM), an organization uniting 42 states, and the United Nations Environment Programme.
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