It seems a truce is coming, but the summer’s refrain has been the extreme heat, which has broken records. The European press has not stopped publishing this summer evidence of the changes caused by rising temperatures. The waters of Mallorca reached 33 degrees weeks ago, while the people of Valencia endured the thermometer rising to 44 yesterday. The drought has rendered rivers like the Rhine or the Danube useless for navigation for weeks, while in the Netherlands firefighters faced forest fires they had never seen before. The Economist praises the quality of wines of Swedish origin. Moreover, in southern England the climate is so similar to that of the French Champagne 40 years ago that they have already started producing sparkling wines. The once green Hyde Park looked like a wasteland this summer, coffee plantations are now being planted in Andalusia as harvesting avocados is no longer surprising, and even the pianos of orchestras in half of Europe go out of tune due to the heat… The predictions from a few years ago are now the present.
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Preventing climate change should be a priority, but political winds do not favor agreements to combat it. Meanwhile, adaptation plans are urgent. The list of tasks is endless. Longer droughts force the modernization of irrigation and changes in crops and livestock production. Energy is a key sector and, although Spain has advanced a lot in renewables, storage still needs improvement. It is imperative to have fire prevention bodies, not just extinguishing ones, that assess and foresee actions on the ground in the face of fires that exceed our capacity to put them out. An activity as important to the Spanish economy as tourism is obliged to adapt, even though it now seems that the arrival of visitors has no end. Housing, which is so concerning due to its price, must be subject to construction conditions that guarantee lower energy consumption. Urban planning is another pending front. Not to mention the arduous and urgent work of adapting infrastructures to face extreme weather phenomena. The infernal heatwave will subside, but we could go from a chain of heat waves to a train of DANA storms. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
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