分类： environment

A devastating combination of prolonged drought and repeated extreme heat waves has pushed the Danube River, one of Europe’s most critical water and energy infrastructure arteries, to historically low water levels, triggering a regional energy crisis that has forced governments across Central and Eastern Europe to implement urgent power conservation measures.

On Monday, water levels at the Danube running through Hungary’s capital Budapest dropped to approximately 10 centimeters (4 inches), a reading far below the previous all-time low of 33 centimeters (13 inches) recorded in 2018. With no substantial rainfall forecast in the coming days or weeks, and a new blistering heat wave bringing daytime temperatures above 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) driving sharp increases in both electricity and water demand, hydrological conditions are not expected to improve any time soon.

The most pressing crisis is unfolding at Hungary’s Paks Nuclear Power Plant, the nation’s single largest source of electricity, which relies on Danube water to cool its four Soviet-built reactors. Now in its 44th year of operation, the facility is teetering on the edge of a total shutdown for the first time in its history. By Monday, successive reactor power reductions had cut output from the plant’s typical 2,000 megawatts to just 240 megawatts.

In a Facebook video posted Monday, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced that engineering teams had successfully kept the plant’s last operating turbine running temporarily, staving off a full shutdown that was projected over the weekend. Magyar noted that a complete power down is still likely to occur as early as Tuesday or Wednesday, but called the temporary reprieve good news, especially amid peak summer energy demand.

Located roughly 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Budapest, Paks supplies nearly half of Hungary’s total electricity generation and meets around a third of domestic consumption. To offset the massive output gap created by the plant’s reduced operations, Hungary has turned to regional electricity imports and scaled up utilization of renewable energy sources.

Last week, the Hungarian government called on large industrial energy users to cut consumption and asked households to voluntarily reduce power use during peak demand hours between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. Starting Monday, the government banned electric freight trains from operating during peak hours, a measure expected to save between 70 and 90 megawatt-hours of electricity daily. What began as voluntary conservation became mandatory for large industrial and commercial users after the government issued an official decree Saturday. Magyar reported that the collective effort cut national electricity use by 700 megawatts on Sunday, and thanked Hungarian residents for their cooperation.

The crisis extends far beyond Hungary’s borders, with neighboring Serbia and Romania also grappling with crippling low water levels that have disrupted energy production, shipping, and agricultural activity.

In Romania, the Danube’s water flow has dropped to 1,500 cubic meters per second, less than a third of the average July flow. To redirect water into the Danube’s main channel and secure cooling supplies for the state-owned Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant, the Romanian military used 180 kilograms (397 pounds) of explosives to clear rock formations near the lower Danube’s Bala Canal on Monday. Authorities have already shut down one reactor unit at Cernavoda, cutting the plant’s total output to half its normal capacity, and warn the second reactor could also be taken offline if water levels do not rise. Romania declared a nationwide energy sector state of alert Friday, and Acting Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan has appealed to citizens to voluntarily cut electricity use during evening peak hours.

In Serbia, record low Danube levels have forced the country’s primary hydroelectric power plant to operate at just 20% of its normal capacity. Prime Minister Djuro Macut convened an emergency energy crisis meeting in Belgrade on Monday, and urged residents to minimize use of high-power household appliances, particularly air conditioning. Over the weekend, Macut described the unfolding situation as “serious and demanding.”

Associated Press correspondents Jovana Gec in Belgrade, Serbia, and Stephen McGrath in Leamington Spa, England contributed reporting to this article.

As Europe confronts one of its most severe summer wildfire emergencies in recent memory, multiple countries are facing expanding blazes, tragic loss of life, and stretched emergency response capacity, with high temperatures and shifting wind patterns keeping authorities on high alert.

On the Greek front, the crisis took a devastating turn Sunday when two firefighting helicopters collided midair while battling a large wildfire burning west of Athens, the nation’s capital. The crash killed two crew members: one Greek national and one Danish firefighter who had been deployed to support Greece’s wildfire response. Two other crew members on the second helicopter — a Greek and a British national — survived with minor injuries and were transported to a local hospital for treatment. The collision occurred near the coastal community of Psatha, where the fire had been raging since Friday morning.

By first light Monday, authorities dispatched 10 additional air assets — five water-dropping planes and five helicopters — to support nearly 500 ground firefighters working to contain the blaze. The collision highlighted the extreme risks facing first responders on the most volatile front of Europe’s wildfire crisis, even as new evacuation orders were issued for three additional communities near Athens in the early hours of Monday as flames pushed deeper into the Attica region. More than 1,000 people have been displaced by the fire so far, including over 250 residents and visitors who were rescued by boat from local beaches as flames reached the coastline.

Greek firefighting authorities announced Sunday that the blaze has been traced to an electrical fault: sparks from a faulty power line connecting a private wind generator facility to the national grid triggered the fire. Two people have already been arrested in connection with the incident, including an electrical engineer who oversaw the project’s design and a contractor who worked on the transmission line. Both face felony arson charges, and an arrest warrant has also been issued for the owner of the wind generator company.

For Greece, large summer wildfires are a recurring annual disaster. Hot, dry conditions combined with frequent strong winds create ideal conditions for small sparks to escalate into major infernos. Officials note that more than 90% of the hundreds of wildfires the country fights each year stem from human negligence, as common risk mitigation measures such as bans on open-air barbecues, welding, and the use of power saws in dry forest areas are regularly ignored. In a separate incident Sunday, authorities on the Greek island of Kefalonia arrested a man on suspicion of deliberately starting a wildfire that forced the evacuation of multiple nearby villages.

A shift in conditions on Monday brought a small measure of hope: the gale-force winds that had fanned the flames and grounded water-dropping aircraft through the weekend began to die down, allowing crews to resume aerial attacks on the blaze and create new firebreaks to slow its advance. But officials warn that the entire Attica region remains at extreme wildfire risk, with forecasts calling for a new round of rising temperatures later this week.

The wildfire crisis is not limited to Greece. Across Western Europe, France is grappling with the largest wildfire in its modern history, which has already forced what officials describe as the largest peacetime civilian evacuation in the country’s history. Some 224,000 people have been displaced by the Gironde megablaze in southwestern France, which has already burned through 420 square kilometers of land — an area roughly four times the size of the city of Paris. While firefighters managed to contain the blaze within its existing perimeter by Sunday night, dozens of hotspots continue to burn inside the fire zone, and thousands of displaced residents remain unable to return to their homes. Nearly 3,000 French firefighters are deployed to battle this blaze and a second major wildfire burning in the Provence region.

When combined with large-scale blazes in Spain, wildfires across Western and Southern Europe have displaced roughly 350,000 people from their homes and summer vacation sites, emptying communities during the peak tourism season and stretching emergency response services across multiple simultaneous disasters.

By the end of a scorching European summer, a continent-wide wildfire crisis was splitting into starkly divergent situations across the region on Sunday, with gale-force winds pushing flames closer to the Greek capital of Athens and triggering new evacuation orders, while France maintained a tense watch over a massive, still-active blaze that already carved a destruction zone four times the size of Paris, and major wildfires in Spain finally halted their spread.

Greece remained the epicenter of immediate, life-threatening risk on Sunday. Violent gale-force winds pushed growing fire lines deeper into western Attica, the administrative region that encompasses Athens, putting coastal villages and an industrial zone outside the city of Megara in grave danger. The same powerful gusts that amplified fire spread also grounded firefighting aircraft, preventing crews from scooping water from nearby seas to douse the flames.

As of Sunday, Greek authorities had ordered fresh mandatory evacuations for three additional communities: Kandili, Agia Skepi and Toutouli, with officials flagging particular concern for Porto Germeno, a popular seaside community on the Gulf of Corinth. Nearly 500 firefighters and 23 aircraft were deployed to contain the blaze, which ignited Friday near Agios Vasileios before sweeping toward coastal areas and pushing into the forested Geraneia Mountains west of Athens.

For coastal communities cut off by fast-moving flames and smoke, evacuation by sea became a last-resort escape route. By Saturday, rescuers had pulled 254 people from the sea near Agios Vasileios and an additional 12 from Porto Germeno. Wildfire meteorologist Theodore Giannaros estimated Saturday the blaze had already scorched between 40 and 50 square kilometers of land, though Greek officials had not released an official confirmed estimate as of Sunday.

Local resident Minas Tzortzanis, a farmer in the area, described the irreversible damage to the once-lush landscape. “A pristine forest, a paradise, was surrendered to the hands of the fire,” he said Saturday. “There are no words to explain what has happened. Destruction. Total destruction.”

The unfolding disaster carries grim historical weight for Greece: in 2018, a similarly wind-fueled wildfire trapped residents in the seaside Athens suburb of Mati, killing 104 people in what remains the deadliest wildfire Europe has seen this century.

Hundreds of kilometers to the west, where emergency conditions had begun to ease, little relief was available for thousands displaced by France’s largest wildfire on record. The Gironde megafire, which forced the evacuation of 224,000 people — what officials say is likely the largest peacetime evacuation in French history — has already scorched 420 square kilometers of dense forest, an area four times the size of the city of Paris. While the fire’s forward spread has been contained, active hotspots still burn deep within the destruction zone, and thousands of evacuated residents remain unable to return to their homes.

Nearly 3,000 firefighters are still deployed across two major French blazes: the Gironde megafire in the southwest, and a second large wildfire in Provence that stopped spreading but has not been fully contained. The Gironde region remains under France’s highest red wildfire alert, with persistent dry conditions, record-high temperatures near Bordeaux and expected afternoon winds continuing to raise the risk of the fire breaking through containment lines.

To reinforce overstretched crews, additional firefighters from Ukraine, Lithuania and French Polynesia were scheduled to arrive in the region over Sunday and Monday.

In southeastern France’s Var department, hundreds of kilometers from Gironde, nearly 1,500 firefighters continued to battle a separate blaze that tore through 18 square kilometers of the Gros Bessillon hills in just over 24 hours. Authorities reported the fire had been stabilized by Sunday morning, meaning its perimeter did not expand overnight, but it had not yet been declared fully contained.

Firefighting aircraft supported ground crews working to hold the fire back from small villages scattered across the vineyards, olive groves and wooded hills that give the region its nickname of Green Provence. Roughly 2,500 residents have been evacuated as the fire advanced, marking the fourth major wildfire to hit central Var since July 19. Earlier that week, a smaller blaze near Brignoles forced Hollywood actor George Clooney, his family and 700 other local residents to evacuate before it could be brought under control.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu noted that most wildfires across the country were currently under control, but warned that conditions could shift rapidly at any time. He also announced that a national coordinator based out of the prime minister’s office would oversee long-term reconstruction efforts for communities and ecosystems damaged by the blazes. Since the start of 2022, more than 1,170 square kilometers of French land has burned in wildfires.

The ongoing wildfire crisis across Europe is unfolding against a well-documented climate backdrop: the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirms Europe has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, making it the world’s fastest-warming continent. Higher average temperatures and prolonged drought have left forests and scrubland far drier and more flammable, allowing wildfires to spread faster and burn with far greater intensity than in decades past.

In a rapid analysis released Thursday while French blazes were still actively spreading, a team of scientists from World Weather Attribution found that human-caused climate change has doubled the likelihood of the extreme fire weather conditions that fueled the Gironde megafire.

Taken together, wildfires in France and Spain alone have displaced roughly 330,000 people from their homes and summer vacation sites, emptied entire communities at the peak of tourist season, and stretched firefighting resources and emergency services thin as crews responded to multiple simultaneous disasters across the continent.

Across sweltering Western Europe, a record-breaking summer drought has left iconic infrastructure, agricultural sectors and key shipping routes reeling, with the low-lying Netherlands — a nation defined by its centuries-long battle to hold back water — facing an unprecedented test of its famed flood defense network. As wildfires rage across southern France and Spain, and major waterways including the Danube and Rhine drop to historic lows, the Netherlands has mobilized hundreds of volunteers to patrol its thousands of kilometers of dikes, hunting for hidden cracks and weaknesses that could spell disaster in future rain events.

Near the small agricultural town of Waddinxveen, located east of The Hague and roughly 5 meters below sea level, volunteers Jeroen Wouda and Dirk Boom follow a slow, methodical route along an inland peat dike, probing the bone-dry earthen embankment with metal rods and scanning parched grass for subtle patches of green that signal an unseen leak. This modern patrol echoes the centuries-old folk tale of the Dutch boy who plugged a dike breach with his finger, but today’s monitoring uses 21st-century tools: volunteers log potential flaws directly in a mobile app, alerting water authorities who can dispatch repair crews within hours.

Peter van Duijvendijk, flood defense manager at the Schieland en de Krimpenerwaard water corporation, one of 21 regional water management bodies that oversee flood protection across the Netherlands, says 140 trained volunteers in his district alone patrol 100 kilometers of dikes throughout the dry season. So far, no major structural damage has been detected, but patrols will remain active through the fall as soil conditions stay unstable. “These volunteers are our eyes and ears on the dike,” van Duijvendijk explained to the Associated Press. Unlike concrete coastal flood barriers, inland dikes in the Netherlands are often built from peat, a porous organic soil that relies on consistent moisture to retain its structural strength. When peat dries out, it shrinks and weakens, creating gaps that can allow water to breach the barrier and flood low-lying reclaimed polder land during periods of heavy rain. “Because it is so dry right now the peat loses moisture, and because of that it becomes weaker,” van Duijvendijk said. “If that peat becomes weaker, then there is a chance that water will flow through the dike.”

The drought’s impacts extend far beyond dike integrity, rippling through regional economies and critical transport networks. The Rhine, Europe’s most vital inland freight waterway that connects North Sea ports to industrial heartlands in Germany and landlocked Central Europe, dropped below its 2018 record low near Cologne, Germany, over the weekend. Marcel Beck, manager of the western German ports of Neuss, Düsseldorf and Cologne for logistics firm RheinCargo, called the low water levels “devastating” for commercial shipping. Whereas a single cargo vessel can typically carry 2,000 to 2,500 metric tons of freight along the Rhine, water depths are now so shallow that most ships can only load 400 to 600 metric tons to avoid running aground on sandbars. “This places an enormous burden on the entire transport chain to reorganize everything in order to still get the goods inland,” Beck said. In the eastern Netherlands, the Waal river — the main Dutch branch of the Rhine — has receded so far that long-submerged items like rusted bicycles and discarded shopping carts are now exposed on the dry riverbed, and dozens of houseboats are sitting directly on the exposed sandy river bottom. Frans Schilte, a houseboat owner in the city of Nijmegen, has observed that low-water seasons have grown longer and more severe in recent years, extending from the historic one-month average to three full months. His own steel-hulled boat now rests on the riverbed, sitting slightly off-level as a result. “It’s not a big problem,” Schilte said, “but it’s the negative effect of climate change.”

For the Netherlands, a country where roughly one-third of total land sits below sea level, managing water has always required a delicate balancing act: winter brings the constant threat of catastrophic flooding, while extended summer droughts increasingly bring the opposite problem of water scarcity. Deltares, an independent Dutch water research institute, says the country has enough total annual freshwater to meet all needs, but seasonal distribution is the core challenge. “In the winter we drain it away quickly because we want to keep our feet dry and we don’t want water on the land,” explained Vince Kaandorp, a groundwater hydrologist at Deltares. “How can you ensure that you do that slowly and give water time to sink into the ground?” Kaandorp notes that solutions don’t require massive high-tech infrastructure: simple adjustments like adding hedgerows along river banks can slow runoff, giving rainwater more time to seep into deep groundwater reserves. Dutch water authorities are currently researching how to modify agricultural and riparian soil to act like natural sponges, holding more moisture through dry summer months.

Even with these adaptive measures, the drought has already caused significant disruption for Dutch agriculture. Some regions have banned farmers from pumping canal water for crop irrigation as authorities work to preserve freshwater supplies and prevent saltwater intrusion into low-lying reclaimed lands. Western Dutch polders, which produce much of the country’s fruit and vegetable crops, are facing increasing salinization as freshwater levels drop and seawater seeps into groundwater reserves. Farmers are warning of reduced harvests and higher consumer prices for summer fruit this year. “It is an extremely challenging year for growers,” said John Kusters, chair of the Netherlands Fruit Growers’ Organization, in a public statement.

A sweeping heatwave, fueled by a strengthening North African subtropical anticyclone hovering over the Mediterranean, has pushed most of Italy’s major urban centers into the country’s highest temperature risk category, triggering urgent public health warnings across the continent as wildfires rage through multiple southern European nations.

Italian health authorities confirmed Saturday that 19 cities stretching from the northern industrial hub of Milan to the southern metropolis of Naples, including the capital Rome and canal city Venice, are already under a red alert for extreme heat. By the start of the coming week, that number will jump to 25 of Italy’s 27 major population centers, leaving only two locations – Reggio Calabria on the southern tip of the Italian mainland and the Sicilian city of Messina – on the second-highest amber warning level.

Officials stress that the risk of heat-related illness extends beyond traditionally vulnerable groups, which include older adults, infants and young children, and people living with chronic medical conditions. Even healthy, physically active people face dangerous health impacts from the current conditions, they warn. Residents in high-risk areas have been instructed to stay indoors between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., avoid prolonged exposure to heat and direct sunlight, and maintain steady hydration to prevent heat stroke and other heat-related emergencies.

Italy’s extreme heat alert comes as a cascade of overlapping heatwaves across the continent has created tinder-dry conditions ideal for the spread of destructive wildfires. Across Greece, France, Portugal and Spain, thousands of firefighters are working around the clock to contain blazes that have already burned hundreds of thousands of hectares of land.

In southeastern France, local authorities reported Friday evening that a wildfire that had been contained for several days reignited in the Var region, forcing the evacuation of roughly 2,500 residents and visitors. In the southwestern Gironde region, by contrast, a large wildfire that displaced hundreds of thousands of people has finally been brought under control, allowing roughly 200,000 evacuated residents to return to their homes over the weekend.

In Greece, hundreds of people, the majority of whom were traveling tourists, were evacuated by sea from the coastal town of Viotia after wildfires surrounded the area, cutting off overland escape routes. EU climate data shows that 2026 is already on track to be an unprecedented year for wildfire damage across the Iberian Peninsula: Spain has seen more than 200,000 hectares of land burned by August, a total roughly five times the average amount burned over the same period in a typical year. Portugal has also recorded far more burned area than the seasonal average.

The cascading extreme weather events align with long-term climate trends documented by leading scientific bodies. The Copernicus Climate Change Service confirms that climate change is driving global temperature increases, and Europe is warming faster than any other continent – heating at twice the rate of the global average. This accelerated warming has triggered a steady rise in the frequency and intensity of summer heatwaves, increased strain on regional water supplies, and created more favorable conditions for large, destructive wildfires across the continent.