The Mediterranean is known for its lush beaches and winding coastline, and now also for its cataclysmic weather extremes, which have turned the region into a region of sweltering heat, raging forest fires and shrinking rivers.

For weeks, Mediterranean nations have been gripped by a brutal mix of heat and drought that has disrupted agricultural production and devastated communities. Spain and Portugal are facing their driest conditions in more than 1,000 years, while wildfires in Greece and France have forced tens of thousands to flee their homes. Across the region, rivers are drying up, leaving power sources in limbo, and thousands of people have died from the heat.

“Climate change kills,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said as temperatures soared in mid-July. “It kills people, as we have seen. It also kills our ecosystem, our biodiversity, and it also destroys the things we hold dear as a society – our homes, our businesses, our livestock.

The Mediterranean is known for its lush beaches and winding coastline, and now also for its cataclysmic weather extremes, which have turned the region into a region of sweltering heat, raging forest fires and shrinking rivers.

For weeks, Mediterranean nations have been gripped by a brutal mix of heat and drought that has disrupted agricultural production and devastated communities. Spain and Portugal face their driest conditions in more than 1,000 years while Forest fires in Greece and France have forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. Throughout the region, rivers are to dryleaving power supplies in limbo, and thousands of people died of heat.

“Climate change kills”, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said as temperatures rose in mid-July. “It kills people, as we have seen. It also kills our ecosystem, our biodiversity, and it also destroys the things we hold dear as a society – our homes, our businesses, our livestock.

The apocalyptic scenes in the Mediterranean are some of the clearest examples of how the climate crisis is already upending life around the world and a harbinger of what more may be in store. It’s also part of a brutal global pattern: in the UK record heat has melted roads and forced the government to declare a national emergency. The American West has baked under an acute heatwave and drought, coastal communities on Australia’s east coast are at risk of washand extreme flooding in China have moved hundreds of thousands of people.

“What’s really different is that this kind of temperature is happening everywhere,” said Lisa Schipper, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. “It’s not just in Europe.”

Although sweltering summers are not abnormal in the Mediterranean, which has a drier climate for starters, human-powered climate change has made extreme events like heat waves and droughts even more intense, longand frequent. The region, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called “climate change hotspot”—is now heating up 20 percent faster than the average global rate, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

“It’s not just warming, but it’s a combination of warming and drought and the fact that it’s pushing us beyond the regional limits of sustainability for the agricultural system,” said Wolfgang Cramer, research director of the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology.

The recent heat wave has hit farmers in southern France, Greece, Spain and Italy, all of whom are experiencing lower yields and subsequent losses. Coldiretti, the Italian farmers’ association, said a third of Italian farms are now forced to produce at a loss due to the global food crisis and persistent drought. To add more fuel to the fire, an Italian region has now become a breeding ground for locusts due to its dry climate and is now facing its worst plague of locusts in three decades.

Beloved Mediterranean staples like wine and olives have not been spared either. In Spain, local winemakers are sounding the alarm as forest fires char their vines while others struggle to produce half of what they used to. Andalusia in southern Spain, which is the world’s largest producer of olive oil, is one high risk drying up while farmers fear lack of watering-expensive in itself- compounded by the depletion of reservoirs can affect both the quantity and quality of their yield.

According to European Commission, sharp drops in precipitation have increased drought risks and water scarcity in Italy, Greece, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Iberian Peninsula. As temperatures warm up, the longest river in Italy, the Po, which is used to irrigate local crops, such as rice and corn as well as wine, is now drying up. In the south, Morocco is expected to reach total water scarcity by 2030.

To mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, many European countries have pledged to adopt strong policy measures, with the European Union mandating climate neutral by 2050 and a 55 percent drop in net emissions by 2030. The world is facing a ‘moment of truth’, says European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared in 2021. “It’s not a question of 30 to 40 years. The snow. This is the decade where we need to improve or we risk reaching irreversible tipping points.

The war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis, however, have complicated these efforts. To cope with Russian gas cuts and exorbitant prices, Italy, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands all announced in June that they would restart their coal-fired power plants. But if such temporary measures become permanent, experts warn they would set back global efforts to tackle climate change.

“The danger is that short-term solutions can easily become long-term solutions,” said Brian Hoskins, a professor at Imperial College London.

Dwindling water supplies have only exacerbated these ongoing energy challenges, especially for countries dependent on nuclear power. France receives approximately 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, many of which depend on rivers for cooling. But many of those shrinking rivers are now also too hot to use, further jeopardizing the country’s already stretched energy supply. “A significant part of nuclear power plants in France have been shut down due to global warming and drought,” Cramer said.

As climate change causes sea levels to rise, experts warn that Mediterranean communities could face a particularly ominous future. According to a reportsea ​​levels in the region could rise by up to 25.6 centimeters by 2050, threatening about a third of the Mediterranean population concentrated along its coastal regions as well as the multiple UNESCO sites, including the city of Venice and the early Christian monuments of Ravenna. From Saint-Tropez to Amalfi, many of the most attractive tourist destinations in the Mediterranean, teeming with residential and commercial activity, are also the most threatened.

“Even though there is nothing visible, we can still say that he exerted a lot of pressure in this direction,” said Grammenos Mastrojeni, the principal deputy general secretary. at the Secretariat of the Union for the Mediterranean, on the impact of climate change on environmental migrations in the region. “We see that the communities are adapting and resisting, and they are increasingly aware of the issues.

But if sufficient state action is not taken – and the crisis continues to deepen – experts warn the world could face an increasingly unmanageable climate future.

“We often say that the Mediterranean could be considered a microcosm for the world because we have so many different situations everywhere,” said Lina Tode, deputy director of Plan Bleu, a regional activity center of the United Nations Program for the Environment. ‘environment. “A lot of people say if we can solve the Mediterranean, we can solve the world.”