It was more than 48 ° C, Thursday, August 18, in El Tarf, Guelma and Souk Ahras, three cities in Algeria plagued by fires with an already heavy provisional toll. They caused the death of thirty-eight people, injured more than 200, led to the evacuation of hundreds of families and a hospital. Some 1,700 firefighters are mobilized there to try to put out twenty-four forest fires.
Meanwhile, a little further north, Corsica suffered violent storms which killed at least five people and injured about twenty others, four of them very seriously. The majority of them were victims of exceptional gusts of wind – up to 224 km/h on the west coast of the island – which uprooted trees and roofs, caused power cuts for 35,000 inhabitants, littered the roads with tree branches, broken the moorings of boats.
Extreme storm on one side, drought on the other: the shores of the Mediterranean are experiencing two facets of the same scourge: climate change. But this is, on average, even faster than in the rest of the world. In the Mediterranean basin, the average temperature has increased by 0.036°C per year between 1993 and 2020, or almost 1°C in total, according to data from Copernicus, the European Earth observation programme.
The effects of this development are manifesting themselves sharply this summer. To the west, Spain and Portugal are plagued by forest fires. Morocco is probably facing its worst drought in forty years; its dams are three-quarters empty: together, their filling rate does not exceed 27%. To the east, the desert advances into Iraq, where the combined flow of the Euphrates and Tigris has halved in two decades.
Admittedly, climate change does not explain all of these phenomena, but it is indeed responsible for the heat waves which are multiplying even in the sea. Between the French, Spanish and Italian coasts, temperatures of 6.5° C above seasonal norms have been measured, and very significant temperature anomalies have lasted for 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 sea heat waves have devastating effects for wildlife and their habitats: corals, posidonia meadows, etc.
The Mediterranean, one of the planet’s hotspots
In 2020, a large body of knowledge on climate and environmental change in the Mediterranean was published, a geographical area generally divided between the three continents that border it. It is the fruit of the work of several years of research by 190 scientists from twenty-five countries, supported by the Union for the Mediterranean (UPM), an organization which brings together forty-two States, and the United Nations Program for the environment.
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