分类： environment

A catastrophic wildfire tearing through Belgium’s iconic High Fens nature reserve has become the largest blaze the country has seen in modern history, forcing mass evacuations and prompting an international cross-border rescue effort amid an ongoing regional heat and drought crisis.

The inferno, which was first detected as it expanded rapidly in eastern Belgium near the German border, had already scorched more than 27 square kilometers of protected heathland and peat bog by Sunday — double the size of the previous record-breaking 2011 fire that burned through the same protected ecosystem. The challenging landscape of the High Fens, with its mixture of dry, flammable heath and deep peat deposits, has severely hampered containment efforts for emergency crews.

When shifting winds pushed thick toxic smoke toward populated areas on Saturday, local officials ordered 600 residents across two nearby municipalities in Liège Province — Waimes and Bütgenbach — to evacuate immediately. Tourists visiting the popular natural reserve were also told to leave the high-risk zone, and a local gymnasium was set up as a temporary emergency shelter for displaced people. As of Sunday morning, authorities confirmed no residential structures had been damaged by the fire, but the blaze remains dangerously close to populated neighborhoods, and heavy smoke continues to blanket the region. Officials have issued a strict order for non-emergency personnel to avoid the fire zone, noting that excess civilian traffic could block access for response vehicles and slow ongoing firefighting operations.

To scale up response efforts, Belgium activated the European Union’s Civil Protection Mechanism to request support from other member states. “The High Fens are burning. Belgium is not facing it alone,” Hadja Lahbib, the European Commissioner for Crisis Management, announced on the social platform X. In response to the call, Sweden dispatched two specialized water-bombing aircraft, while the Netherlands and the Czech Republic each contributed additional firefighting helicopters to join the two helicopters already operated by Belgian federal police. In total, more than 250 emergency personnel have been deployed to the fire line, including firefighters from both Belgium and neighboring Germany, police officers, military personnel and civil protection workers.

The wildfire follows weeks of record-breaking high temperatures and minimal rainfall across Western Europe. Belgium recorded another round of extreme heat earlier this week, with temperatures hitting 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 Fahrenheit) across parts of the country on Friday. The dry conditions have turned vegetation across the region into tinder, increasing wildfire risk dramatically.

The cross-border impact of the blaze has already prompted emergency precautions in Germany. Local authorities in the German border town of Monschau warned overnight Saturday that the fire front was just 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the German border, and placed local firefighting units on high alert. Early Sunday, officials ordered temporary evacuation for three outlying districts near the border, citing unavoidable health risks from drifting wildfire smoke.

The Belgian blaze is part of a wider pattern of extreme wildfire activity across Western Europe this summer. In southwestern France, firefighters have spent days battling a separate wildfire that has burned 17 square kilometers of pine forest in the Landes region. Local prefect Gilles Clavreul reported Sunday that the fire had not seen any major new flare-ups overnight, noting that “the situation is developing rather favorably.” Around 650 residents have already been evacuated from the Landes area, and this blaze marks the third major wildfire to hit the region’s vast pine forests this summer, following two large outbreaks in late July. Just last month, a massive wildfire in the neighboring Gironde department burned more than 420 square kilometers of land, forced 220,000 people to evacuate, and spread toward the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux.

A devastating out-of-control wildfire sweeping across Belgium’s iconic High Fens, the nation’s largest nature reserve, has been labeled the worst blaze the country has faced in modern history, prompting a cross-border emergency response as extreme heat continues to fuel widespread fire risk across the European continent.

The inferno first ignited on Friday within the protected nature park, which sits along Belgium’s eastern border with Germany. By Saturday, flames had already consumed roughly one-third of the reserve’s vast landscape of bogland, moorland, and old-growth forest, forcing mandatory evacuation orders for residents of two nearby villages. Local emergency officials issued urgent warnings that advancing flames were on a trajectory that could put residential neighborhoods at risk.

Challenged by the reserve’s uneven, hard-to-reach terrain and shifting wind patterns, Belgian firefighters have been forced to make tactical concessions to contain the spread, allowing some sections of heathland to burn in order to redirect resources to higher-priority protection zones. As of Saturday afternoon, regional authorities confirmed the blaze still remained unchecked. “There is a risk that the fire could reach homes, but we are deploying all available resources to protect them,” explained Nicolas Yernaux, a spokesperson for Wallonia’s regional government. A nearby local gymnasium has been converted into a temporary emergency shelter to house the evacuated residents.

Gregory Melotte, a firefighter on the front lines of the suppression effort, told Belgian public broadcaster RTBF that crews had made limited progress holding back the blaze. “We managed to calm the fire coming from the plain, to prevent it from spreading into the fir forest. We still succeeded in our mission, but it’s not over yet. The flames are coming towards us, the wind has shifted twice, once in our favour, once against us,” he said.

To boost their response capacity, Belgian authorities activated the European Union’s civil protection mechanism, calling for additional support from neighboring and allied member states. European Commissioner Hadja Lahbib confirmed that cross-border reinforcements were already en route by Saturday: two water-bombing aircraft from Sweden, plus one helicopter deployed by the Czech Republic and a second from the Netherlands.

The High Fens fire is far from an isolated incident. Across Europe, multiple major wildfires were burning simultaneously over the weekend, amplified by a summer of record-breaking heat that has left vegetation parched and landscapes extremely fire-prone. In southwestern France’s Landes region, a wildfire that first ignited on Thursday reignited unexpectedly on Saturday, forcing 650 local residents to flee their homes. More than 500 French firefighters have been deployed to bring that blaze under control.

Since Friday, new major fire outbreaks have also been recorded in Croatia, Spain, and Serbia, adding to a growing list of fire events across the continent that have already destroyed thousands of hectares of forest and natural land. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has officially confirmed that Western Europe just experienced the hottest June-to-July period ever recorded since systematic monitoring began, creating the ideal dry, hot conditions for large-scale wildfire ignition and spread.

A catastrophic wildfire that ranks among the most destructive in Croatia’s modern history has carved a deadly path across the country’s Adriatic coastline, leaving at least one person dead and nearly 40 others injured, 10 of them in intensive care, after raging through coastal communities from Thursday night into Friday morning. The inferno ignited late Thursday near the small village of Lokva Rogoznica, and rapidly advanced toward the popular coastal tourist hub of Omis, located just six kilometers away. Fanned by gale-force winds that pushed flames across dry pine-covered hillsides, the blaze spread at an unprecedented rate, consuming 1,000 hectares of land in just four hours, destroying everything in its path, including dozens of homes and parked vehicles.

Approximately 1,200 people, both local residents and visiting tourists, were forced to flee the advancing fire, with emergency responders opening temporary shelters in multiple nearby coastal towns to house those displaced. Dramatic footage shared across social media captured apocalyptic scenes: thick black smoke choking the sky and turning it bright red, massive flames devouring vegetation, and panicked onlookers trapped as the fire cut off escape routes. Some desperate evacuees were forced to jump from their boats into the Adriatic Sea to escape the intense heat and advancing flames.

Over 300 firefighters were deployed to contain the blaze overnight, but rapid spread and extreme conditions forced crews to repeatedly retreat to avoid being trapped. Viseslav Pesic, commander of the Omis Volunteer Fire Department, told news outlet Reuters that the intensity of the fire led many fleeing residents to abandon their vehicles directly in active fire zones, blocking access routes and slowing emergency response efforts. On Friday morning, search teams conducting sweep operations of burned-out areas discovered the body of the fire’s first fatality, and search operations continued in affected zones as of Friday afternoon.

During an official visit to the impacted region on Friday, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic commended the relentless work of emergency crews, noting that the fire spread at “lightning speed” driven by powerful winds. “What the firefighters have managed to save here is truly a miracle,” Plenkovic told reporters on site. Croatia’s national fire chief Slavko Tucakovic echoed that assessment, labeling the event “one of the worst” wildfires in the nation’s recorded history.

This devastating blaze is far from an isolated event: much of Southern Europe is currently grappling with a wave of extreme wildfire activity, driven by a record-breaking summer of prolonged heatwaves and persistent dry conditions that have left vegetation tinder-dry across the continent. In Greece, more than 200 people were evacuated by sea from a beach resort in Agios Vasileios as wildfires spread across the country. In southwestern France’s Landes region, over 500 residents were displaced by a new blaze near an area already left devastated by earlier wildfires this summer. In western Germany, 2,000 residents of the village of Gey were ordered to evacuate when a forest fire advanced toward the settlement near the Belgian border. In the United Kingdom, authorities issued an emergency “very high risk” wildfire alert to millions of people across England and Wales on Friday, as firefighters battle multiple active blazes in the West Midlands.

CHICAGO – A landmark cross-border animal rescue effort reached a new milestone this week as four more beluga whales completed their journey from a shuttered Canadian theme park to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, bringing the total number of relocated belugas at the facility to eight. This transfer marks the second group of whales moved from Ontario’s Marineland, an amusement park near Niagara Falls that permanently closed to the public in late 2024, following an initial batch of four belugas that arrived at Shedd last July.

The relocation is part of a broader, internationally coordinated rescue plan approved by the Canadian government that will eventually move all 30 whales and four dolphins remaining at Marineland to accredited aquariums and marine parks across the United States and Spain. Without the approval of this rescue effort, animal welfare experts warn the entire captive population would have faced mass euthanasia.

Marineland, which first announced it was up for sale in early 2023, has long faced scrutiny over the health and welfare of its marine mammal population. Data obtained through Canadian freedom-of-information laws and official public statements confirms that 20 marine mammals – 19 belugas and one killer whale – have died at the facility since 2019, raising urgent calls for a swift intervention to save the remaining animals.

The international transfer operation is unprecedented in scale and complexity, requiring months of meticulous advance planning to ensure the whales’ safety during travel. Each beluga is transported in custom-built supportive slings housed inside temperature-controlled shipping containers, designed to reduce stress and physical strain during the cross-border journey. Months before the first transfer, a team of veterinary and animal care experts from the receiving facilities traveled to Marineland to collaborate with the park’s former caretakers and review years of detailed health records for every whale, crafting personalized care plans for each animal.

“This is a very complex and unprecedented rescue effort. This has never been done before,” explained Charlie Jacobsma, Shedd Aquarium’s director of animal behavior and training. To support a smooth social transition for the highly social belugas, Jacobsma noted that the new arrivals were first introduced to the aquarium’s existing resident belugas through controlled gated interactions, allowing the animals to gradually select their own social groups before sharing a full habitat. Currently, the eight relocated belugas share space with three long-term resident belugas at Shedd, and caretakers have already observed positive social engagement, including affiliative behaviors and the iconic vocalizations belugas use to communicate.

“Belugas are very social animals,” Jacobsma said. “It was really special to be able to see some of our animals pairing up with these new animals.”

Veterinary staff at Shedd are providing round-the-clock care to help the new arrivals adjust to their new environment, monitoring the whales’ health and behavior constantly throughout the transition period. “All the belugas are taking the adjustment to their new home day by day,” said Dr. Karisa Tang, Shedd’s lead veterinarian. The care team tracks the whales’ food intake, social interactions, and physical comfort minute by minute, checking for signs of stress, soreness, or injury, and looking for indicators of well-being such as calm, relaxed swimming patterns.

Tang added that belugas’ distinct expressive faces and individual personalities make the work particularly rewarding for the Shedd team. “Every single day it is an absolute joy to work with belugas. There’s something about them that seems magical,” she said.

Once complete, the full rescue effort will disperse Marineland’s remaining belugas and dolphins across five partner facilities: Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, SeaWorld parks in San Antonio and San Diego, and Oceanografic Valencia in Spain, giving each animal a permanent new home in accredited, welfare-focused facilities.

LONDON – For generations, summer has been synonymous with unhurried days, sun-drenched nights and fleeting freedom from work, school and daily obligations. But in 2026, that idyllic vision of summer is fading, replaced by a season defined by extreme heat, climate-driven disaster and constant adaptation to a warming world.

The calendar still marks summer as a seasonal staple, but climate change fueled by fossil fuel emissions has pushed global temperatures to unprecedented heights. Heat-drenched conditions are becoming the new normal, breaking temperature records across every continent. These soaring temperatures are triggering cascading crises: Arctic ice sheets are melting at accelerated rates, severe droughts parch vast swathes of land, wildfires burn with greater intensity across North America and Europe, and stronger, more destructive storm systems form with increasing frequency. For millions of vulnerable people who lack access to air conditioning, paid time off or the means to escape to cooler destinations, the heat poses a direct, daily threat to safety and health. In Asia, the extreme heat has grown so unrelenting that Japan has introduced a new official weather classification for dangerous heat: *kokusho-bi*, or “cruelly hot day.”

This year, it is the romanticized ideal of summer that has withered like parched grass across England. For many people across the globe, the Summer of 2026 has brought a quiet grief for the loss of that uncomplicated seasonal freedom – and the relaxed, carefree version of ourselves we get to be only when we feel safe under the sun.

“I mourn for the way summer used to be,” wrote climate fiction author Debra Denker in a recent essay reflecting on the leisurely afternoons and 1960s-era Fourth of July neighborhood block parties of her youth. “Unless we change the trajectory we’re on, today’s children will never know the gentle and balmy summers of my childhood … I feel sad that they may never know the truly carefree summers that the more privileged among us enjoyed.”

Related extreme heat events are already unfolding across the world this year: oppressive heat and humidity have blanketed much of the U.S. as students return to the classroom, multiple European nations are battling concurrent large-scale wildfires amid record-breaking temperatures, and British firefighters have been deployed in full force to contain blazes on the UK’s hottest day of the year.

No formal meteorological data is needed to confirm that summer 2026 is fundamentally different from the past, and long-held seasonal rituals are being rewritten. Downwind of out-of-control wildfires in North America and Europe, skies turn a hazy orange and the air carries a gritty, acrid taste. Even in Paris, one of the world’s most beloved summer travel destinations, sweltering conditions under the city’s iconic gray rooftops can turn deadly for vulnerable residents. Nights have become a miserable cycle of fitful sleep, cold showers, and opening windows just to close them again to block out urban street noise.

The once-life-giving summer sun now poses a hazard for most of the day, and checking the local air quality index has become a required first step before stepping outside. People have shifted their routines to complete outdoor work and errands early in the morning, staying indoors through the peak heat hours and staying awake later into the cool night. A full day at the beach, or a traditional August European summer holiday, is now less a leisurely escape and more an exercise in risk management.

New polling from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that far more Americans report that extreme heat has disrupted their travel plans, raised electricity costs, disturbed their sleep, and altered family outdoor activities and daily routines than was the case just two years ago in July 2024. Research from Oxford University, published in July 2026, confirms that intense heat is reshaping daily behavior on a global scale: these routine adaptations to extreme heat are already common across seven of the nations most at risk from heat waves: Brazil, China, France, India, Nigeria, Turkey and the United States.

For many people, this transformed summer is a source of deep discontent. Amber Risebrow, a teacher based in Britain’s Channel Islands, says she longs for the traditional, idyllic British warm season, when sunlight lingers long into the evening. “I wanted the long light evenings and the sunshine and the not-dark-at-4pm of it all,” she shared in a recent Instagram post. “What I did not want was to feel like a rotisserie chicken every single time I stepped outside. Slowly rotating. Gently basting. Questioning my life choices by 10am.”

The data leaves no room for doubt: the long-term trend points to increasingly hot, storm-prone summers. In just one week this summer, extreme heat battered the UK and France, with temperatures climbing close to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). It marked the fifth major heat wave of the year for the region, where central air conditioning remains rare in most homes. Across the Atlantic, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that July 2026 was the hottest single month ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

Globally, 2026 is currently the third-hottest year on record, trailing only 2024 and 2025, according to official climate statistics. But with five months still left in the year, 2026 has time to overtake those previous records. Scientists note that the combined force of accelerating human-caused global warming and an unusually strong El Niño – a periodic warming of Pacific Ocean waters that drives temperature increases worldwide – makes it increasingly likely that 2026 will end the year as the hottest year ever recorded in human history.

“And it’s not just extreme heat,” Clare Nullis, a spokesperson for the World Meteorological Organization, told reporters in Geneva. “We’re also seeing extreme rainfall, tropical cyclones. So we’re not in holiday mode at all.”

Many people have come to accept that life-threatening, travel-disrupting heat waves and their ripple effects are no longer a one-time anomaly, but the new normal. In response, communities and individuals have adopted a range of adaptation strategies, with many hoping that adjusting to the heat can preserve at least a shadow of the traditional summertime feeling – for now.

Official advisories urging tourists to avoid outdoor activity during the hottest peak hours have become a standard addition to travel guidance from Cambodia to Cambridge, UK. Dog walking is increasingly restricted to dawn and dusk, with governments in high-heat zones warning owners against midday outings that can put pets at risk of heat stroke. Employers and workers have also adjusted: agricultural and construction workers have shifted their schedules to earlier morning hours, and many workplaces now allow remote work when temperatures become dangerously high.

But for low-income and vulnerable workers without access to air conditioning at home, even indoor space offers little relief. Only around 4% of British households have air conditioning, compared to roughly 90% of homes in the United States, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.

This reality makes clear that accessing the old-fashioned summertime bliss of popular imagination has always been a privilege reserved for those with the means to escape the worst effects of heat. In an essay published last year, comedy writer Elizabeth Simone addressed this gap in a piece titled *An Open Letter to the Person Who Asked Me What I’m Doing For The Summer As If I Didn’t Have to Work*, published in the Weekly Humorist. “You do know that summer vacation is an outdated sham, right?” she wrote. “Obviously it’s because of what summer meant back when we were kids.”

Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed reporting from Tokyo.