A resident holds an empty water hose on Evia (ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

This summer’s apocalyptic scenes of a burning Mediterranean provided a vivid backdrop to yesterday’s IPPC report on climate change. I’m writing this, drenched in sweat, from my ancestral village in Corfu, where I’ve taken my family for August, not expecting to endure Greece’s worst heatwave in thirty-four years.
While Corfu has so far mercifully avoided the wildfires ravaging the rest of the country, Greece’s second largest island, Evia, has been burning for a full week. The desperate fight to stop the flames encroaching on Athens left Evia to be sacrificed for lack of resources. Now thousands of acres of pine forest have been reduced to ash, and thousands of people have been forced to abandon their homes as the wall of flames reaches right to the seashore, its villagers turned refugees in their own country.
For the first time, this trip back to Greece has hit me with the realisation that climate change isn’t just a notional threat on an ever-shifting horizon: it’s already here, right now. The apocalypse has already arrived.
Wildfires are a perennial threat in the Mediterranean, but the changing climate is exacerbating their effect. It isn’t just that the summers are getting hotter: the winter rains that blanket the forest floor with a leafy undergrowth which dampens the threat of fire are getting weaker. Even farmers in Corfu, usually lashed by heavy rain for half the year, now complain that the seasons are now out of kilter, the fruit trees are dying unless irrigated and the water in the wells is running out. The result is that the forests of the northern Mediterranean — perhaps counterintuitively to Northern Europeans, nearly a third of Greece’s land area is made up of forest — have become tinderboxes, beyond the capacity of the state to manage.
As the IPPC report shows, Southern Europe is drying out while Northern Europe is getting wetter, leading to anomalous and devastating floods like those in Germany and even London this summer. In neighbouring Turkey, much of the country’s forested Aegean coast has been destroyed by fire, even as flash floods pummel the country’s normally dryer east. The Mediterranean climate, punctuated by dramatic changes of season so punctual that over the centuries they could be predicted almost to the day, has become erratic. Europe’s most hospitable and productive landscapes have now become now spiteful and vindictive.
How many decades of human habitation are left for the olive and lemon groves, pine forests and vineyards of the northern Mediterranean? It does not seem fanciful, now, to imagine climate refugees within Europe in the coming years, joining the desperate masses pressing on the continent from outside.
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