Climate crisis: Mediterranean tourism suffers as intense wildfires spread

The Mediterranean Tourism Foundation (MTF) has expressed solidarity with the people of the Mediterranean countries where wildfires have been raging due to heightened drought as the worsening of the climate crisis starts showing its effects.

Over the past weeks various cities across the Mediterranean region, including Turkey, Greece, Italy, Albania, Morocco, North Macedonia and Lebanon, have become a wildfire hotspot, with Turkey hit by its most intense blazes on record and a heatwave, producing a high risk of further fires and smoke pollution around the region.

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.

“MTF appeals to the relevant authorities to support the regions and their people facing such tragic disaster with concrete action and without bureaucratic delays,” spokesperson Tonio Cini said.

“More significantly MTF appeals to the global community to embark on urgent action and address climate change matters and the protection of the environment as a top matter on the world agenda. MTF asserts that we need more action in the form of concrete solutions to be driven by both public and private entities. What is happening around us is a wake up call for all of us.”

Climate scientists today 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.

The comprehensive assessment of climate science published on Monday, the sixth such report from the IPCC since 1988, has been eight years in the making, marshalling the work of hundreds of experts and peer-review studies. It represents the world’s full knowledge to date of the physical basis of climate change, and found that human activity was “unequivocally” the cause of rapid changes to the climate, including sea level rises, melting polar ice and glaciers, heatwaves, floods and droughts.

The EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) reported that plumes of smoke from fires in southern Turkey were clearly visible in satellite images of the region, and that the severe scale of the fires has caused high levels of particulate matter pollution over the Eastern Mediterranean area. Persistent exposure to particulate matter pollution is associated with cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer.

“MTF therefore appeals to the decision makers of the global community to urgently promote sustainable tourism actions as a way to bring back stability in these countries and restore the environment. MTF asserts that a fire in the backyard of one’s neighbour will tomorrow definitely threaten one’s own existence. The environment is our joint responsibility wherever we are, whatever we do, and accordingly MTF appeals to all Mediterranean countries to embrace sustainable tourism initiatives as a real weapon for conservation and protection of our unique blue and green environment.”