Heat wave and fires spread to eastern Europe
A man in front of a forest fire in Massarosa, central Italy.
AFP - FEDERICO SCOPPA
Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
After Spain, Great Britain and France, the heat wave that hit Western Europe is now moving east.
Countries like Italy, Greece or Slovenia are also hit by fires.
In Europe, this could be a banner year.
Advertising
Read more
While heatwave alerts are now issued in 16 Italian cities, several fires have broken out in Tuscany, near Bologna or north of Milan.
Already thousands of hectares have gone up in smoke.
Fields and forests are also burning in Poland.
In Slovenia, hundreds of people had to be evacuated due to the threat of flames.
And
Greek firefighters are fighting
dozens of fire starts every day.
Greece calls on Europe to act
According to Copernicus,
the specialized European monitoring service
, since the beginning of the year, in the 27 member countries of the European Union, nearly 518,000 hectares have burned.
This is already more than for the whole of last year when the season of high heat and forest fires is far from over.
“
The climate crisis is now evident across Europe.
The cocktail: high temperatures, winds and severe drought inevitably leads to forest fires
, ”recalled Greek government spokesman Giannis Oikonomou on Thursday July 27.
He calls on “
Europe to act in a coordinated and rapid manner to reverse the climate crisis
”.
“
The solution cannot be given at the national level, because the problem is transnational and huge
,” he says.
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_EN
European Union
Climate change
Natural disasters