At the start of August, wildfires exploded across the Mediterranean basin, fueled by a wicked trio of extreme heat, drought and wind. In southern France, the Aude region around Carcassonne saw the country’s largest blaze since 1949, burning more than 16,000 hectares. In Spain, a 16-day heatwave — described by the national weather service as the most intense on record — set the stage for weeks of fire in the northwest near Zamora.

Greece endured simultaneous outbreaks around Patras, several Ionian islands, and Chios; satellites showed ~100,000 acres burned in just two days. By early September, the EU’s science hub estimated roughly one million hectares scorched across Europe in 2025 — an area bigger than Cyprus — with emissions and fire counts well above last year.

This isn’t just “bad luck.” Rapid attribution studies from World Weather Attribution find that the specific cocktail of hot, dry and windy weather that supercharged fires in Türkiye, Greece and Cyprus this summer is ~10 times more likely because of human-caused climate change. A separate WWA analysis shows extreme fire weather in Spain and Portugal is now effectively “common” in a warming world — a grim new baseline we’ll have to plan around, not a blip we can just ride out.

What it feels like on the ground

Fires today don’t behave like the fires our grandparents knew. Structures ignite faster; smoke is a toxic stew; embers leap roads like they weren’t even there. Our own reporting on smoke’s health harms — even from far-away blazes — is sobering: see how wildfire smoke damages lungs and hearts.

In Israel, we’ve documented both the on-the-line response and long-tail recovery, from front-line firefighting and evacuations to lessons from the Carmel blaze a decade ago — when, counter-intuitively, letting nature lead regrowth proved wiser than rushing in with well-meant tree plantings.

A warmer Mediterranean from climate change means longer fire seasons, drier fuels and stronger heat waves. We’ve reported on this shift for years — from early signals of Mediterranean winter drought trends to the uncomfortable truth that it’s not “just warming” but global scorching.

Add land-use change — abandoned farms, flammable plantations, dense edge housing — and fires spread faster and hit more people. Meanwhile, climate whiplash is reshaping risk across our region; the same storm systems that flood deserts are part of a new normal we covered in MENA’s flash-flood wave.

What we can do next (like, starting yesterday)

Prevention isn’t sexy, but it works. We can make homes less flammable, communities more prepared, and landscapes less primed to explode. That looks like smarter codes and materials — even bio-based ones. Our look at hemp-lime blocks found they smolder slowly and hold structure in fire tests,buying valuable minutes for firefighters  and families alike. For deeper resilience, check out Earthship-style off-grid homes that reduce dependence on fragile grids when heat waves knock power and comms offline.

We also need to treat mental resilience as climate infrastructure. Neighborhood-scale actions can ease eco-anxiety while cutting risk: placemaking to build social ties, shrinking our personal footprints, and backing projects that restore ecosystems at scale — from community-led reforestation in Iran to ambitious corporate pledges like doTERRA’s native tree plantings in Hawaii.

Policy matters too — and we’ll keep holding leaders to account (see our coverage of health-protective climate rules).

What Green Prophet readers can do

Feeling overwhelmed is normal, but it’s not the end of the story. Start where you live: create defensible space (clear brush, prune trees), swap to ember-resistant vents, and ask your city for shaded “cool corridors” and community fire drills. Learn the health basics for smoky days (N95s > cloth masks), keep HEPA purifiers on hand, and check in on elders and neighbors. Put your money and voice behind solutions: fund local ecological grazing and prescribed burns; back nature-positive jobs; and push for serious climate policy, not just slogans.

And yes, keep sharing rigorous reporting — amplify scientists, firefighters, and the communities living on the frontlines. Together, we can make the next fire season a little less brutal, and a little more survivable. Even small steps add up, promise.

The post Mediterranean Mega Fires Burn Record Land as Climate Change Fuels Extreme Heat and Drought appeared first on Green Prophet.

The Californian fires are devastating and no doubt families will want to rebuild what was lost. There is a lot of talk on social media platforms, like by investor Bill Ackman who is looking to invest in AI technologies to predict and help drones stop fires. But sometimes, vernacular building and sound ecological practices can save the day before technology, in a space called low-tech.

Fire hydrants and water packed drones might put out a fire if caught in time, but disaster-proofing your future might be a sound and sustainable move. Hemp blocks, also known as hempcrete are already on the market and are eco-friendly and sustainable construction materials composed of hemp, lime, and water.

In a recent study scientists look at the fire behaviour and structural performance of hemp-based materials in varying formats. They tested raw hemp shives, hemp blocks, and non-load-bearing hemp block walls.

Researchers tested how various kinds of hemp reacted in fire safety and strength tests. 

The study found that hemp blocks don’t catch fire with open flames but rather just smolder slowly, producing very little smoke. In fact, walls made of hemp blocks stayed structurally intact for 2 hours during fire tests.

Tests conducted include cone calorimeter, bomb calorimeter, standard furnace, heat-transfer rating inducing system (H-TRIS), and small-scale elevated temperature material tests. Hemp shives exhibit ignition with sustained flaming, a relatively high heat release rate (HRR), and a relatively low critical heat flux (CHF).

However, the hemp blocks exhibited no flaming ignition, only smouldering combustion, and an HRR an order of magnitude lower. Hemp blocks and hemp shives produced minimal smoke. Hemp blocks charred, and associated discoloration zones have been documented. Tests indicate that limited structural capacity is lost up until 200 °C, whereas at 300 °C, the residual material strength is almost negligible.

Their conclusions were that the hemp block walls maintained their structural stability and integrity for 2 hours of standard fire testing. The ambient-temperature compressive strength of the hemp blocks was determined to be 1.0 MPa. This work is the first comprehensive study on the fire behaviour of hemp blocks and highlights their good performance, whereby they are likely to have a limited impact on fire risk in buildings.

Plastered walls will have a fire performance exceeding those reported in the study, the researchers say. The work was reported in the Journal of Building Engineering.

The research was led by Yohannes Werkina Shewalul and Richard Walls from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. 

Hemp, or industrial hemp, is a plant in the botanical class of Cannabis sativa cultivars grown specifically for industrial and consumable use. It can be used to make a wide range of products. Along with bamboo, hemp is among the fastest growing plants on Earth which makes a great, hearty, sustainable fiber. It has taken nations years to recognize hemp as a viable building and material alternative because tiny amounts of the active ingredient of THC can be found in hemp.

Companies producing hemp blocks:

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A new study has found that the smartphones we all carry in our pockets could help collect weather data from the public to provide early warnings for wildfires and other extreme weather conditions.

All smartphones are equipped with multiple micro-sensors capable of collecting important environmental data, such as temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, magnetic field, light, sound, location, acceleration, gravity, and more. These data help us find our way or define our location and they warn us when the battery overheats or the device absorbs moisture — all in real time, without saving the data.

Professor Colin Price and student Hofit Shachaf from the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences used data collected from the global public via the WeatherSignal app (OpenSignal) to develop a methodology for assessing wildfire risk based solely on smartphone data collected by the public.

The results were published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS).

The researchers demonstrated that smart use of such data could support early warnings for severe wildfire events, especially since millions or even billions of data points are collected worldwide every day by our smartphones. Today, early warning systems in remote forested areas typically lack data due to the absence of weather stations in remote locations. (Some researchers are using using goats, dogs and elephants to predict the weather!)

We take our phones everywhere but the data is normally lost and not saved.

However, many companies have started to collect smartphone data to use for various purposes, with user consent. The researchers believe that this huge data source could aid in forecasting extreme weather and natural disasters.

One key parameter determining the likelihood of a wildfire is the moisture content in vegetation (essentially the fuel available for the fire), which, in turn, is determined by the temperature and relative humidity of the surrounding air. Both the temperature and relative humidity can be easily obtained from the public’s smartphones. But smartphone data do contain errors. The temperature reading might reflect the air conditioning in your office, while the humidity sensor might identify moisture when the user is taking a shower.

The researchers say the huge amount of data collected from smartphones allows us to remove outliers in the data set. Furthermore, since the micro-sensors are not calibrated before they are put in our phones, it was necessary to first calibrate the local smartphone data against commercial meteorological stations. This procedure turned out to be relatively straightforward, with just a single calibration needed to correct a smartphone’s readings.

After calibrating or “training” the device, the researchers analyzed major wildfire events: one was the massive fire in Portugal in July 2013. The results were surprising, with smartphone data collected from the public showing significant anomalies before and during these major fires.

“It’s surprising, but even though each smartphone has its own errors and biases, with large amounts of data from many smartphones, we can average out the errors and still retain useful data,” Shachaf says. “The large volume of data helps overcome issues associated with individual smartphones.”

“Given the rapid increase in the number of smartphones worldwide, we propose utilizing this data source to provide better early warnings to the public and disaster managers about impending natural disasters,” Professor Price concludes. “Better early warnings could prevent natural hazards from becoming natural disasters.”

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Summers are growing hotter, storms more violent, wildfires more frequent and ocean levels are rising. It is becoming increasingly obvious that burning fossil fuels containing millions of years worth of trapped carbon is altering our atmosphere and climate.

Hydrogen is a promising alternative to fossil fuels. It’s abundant, clean burning and has a high mass energy density. With modification it can be used in heating, vehicle engines or fuel-cells as a replacement for carbon-based fuels such as natural gas (CH4) gasoline (C8H18) or diesel fuel (C12H23).

Hydrogen doesn’t have the long-term environmental flaws of fossil fuels. But it is not yet a simple replacement for hydrocarbons. Extracting  green or grey hydrogen takes a considerable amount of energy and geologic hydrogen hasn’t yet been found in commercial quantities.

Hydrogen also has a low volumetric energy density. This means even though one kilogram of hydrogen can provide two to three times the energy of one kilogram of diesel fuel, at standard atmospheric pressure a hydrogen fuel tank requires about 5000 times the volume of a diesel fuel tank in order to provide the same energy and range.

Pressurizing the hydrogen to about 10,000 pounds per square inch improves this so that hydrogen only requires about 7 times the volume of diesel fuel. This pressure is almost twice as high as that which imploded the Titan submersible underwater earlier this year while hunting for the Titantic wreckage.

So while hydrogen is a promising fuel, storage and transport is challenging. If only we could efficiently generate hydrogen near where it is used. A Canadian research team may have the answer in aluminium. 

It takes up to 63 kilowatt-hours to extract one kilogram of aluminium from its bauxite ore. Much of that energy remains trapped in the chemistry of Aluminium in the same way coal and gasoline trap the energy of ancient sunlight.  In fact burning aluminium produces almost twice the energy of burning an equivalent mass of coal.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the energy embedded in a single soda can could power a 14 watt light bulb for 60 hours or a television for two hours. By tuning the particle size and chemistry, the energy embedded in this metal can be used to extract hydrogen from water.

Reza Kholghy, PhD, is research chair in Particle Technology and Combustion Engineering at Carlton University in Ottawa Canada. Dr. Kholghy was kind enough to provide Green Prophet with some insight on this promising new technology.

GreenProphet (GP): How do you use aluminium to produce hydrogen? 

Dr. Kholghy: Aluminium powder is mixed with water and combusts through a high temperature oxidation process. This way, Aluminium takes the oxygen molecule in water and turns into alumina (aluminium oxide) and releases the hydrogen in water molecules.

GP: What is the efficiency compared to other methods of recycling Aluminium?

Dr. Kholghy: This is not a method to recycle aluminium. By combusting it with water, we can get 100% yield, meaning that all of the aluminium will be converted to alumina and for every kg of Aluminium, roughly 1 kg of water is consumed releasing around 111 gr of hydrogen. 

GP: What is the volume and mass energy density compared to hydrogen fuel cell technology?

Dr. Kholghy: The reactor is very compact, a 2 MW reactors only need a footprint of around 300 to 400 sq sq ft and cogenerate heat, hydrogen and alumina. 

GP: Why weren’t we doing this 100 years ago?

Dr. Kholghy: This reaction has been used in a variety of application including green rocket propellant where Aluminium nanoparticles are used. However, the unique feature of our work is finding a way to burn large Aluminium particles 

GP: What is the best scale for an Aluminium hydrogen generator? (car, house, utility…)

Dr. Kholghy: Utility, from 1 MegaWatt and higher. 

GP: What would you tell someone who is sceptical?

Dr. Kholghy: This is just a pice of puzzle towards transitioning to zero carbon energy production. This technology offers off grid solutions for cogeneration of heat, hydrogen as well as valuable high purity alumina that is used in batteries. 

GP: Are you working with other researchers or corporations?

Dr. Kholghy: We are working with a Company called GH Power to develop this technology. 

GP: What is the next step?

Dr. Kholghy: Our industrial partner is working with us to demonstrate the full scale reactor. 

GP: How are impurities removed?

Dr. Kholghy: For hydrogen generation, there is no need to remove impurities. We get similar hydrogen yield no matter if recycled Aluminium with low purity or high purity Aluminium is used. The purity of alumina is similar to the purity of the Aluminium fuel used and we have developed a proprietary process to remove impurities from the produced alumina if needed. 

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Planting trees gives all of us humans a connection to something bigger than ourselves. We also know they suck up greenhouse gases, create habitat for wildlife and other plants and organisms, and simply beautify our world. To counter deforestation and climate change, there has been a trend for social innovation projects and NGOs to offer tree planting services as memorials or in the names of loved ones.  One of the biggest problems with tree planting in the name of someone else in remote locations in Africa, Europe, Asia and beyond is accountability.

Some countries like Israel have been tree-positive planting nations. The state today now has more trees than it did 100 years ago. The only country in my mind that can make such a claim. It a bid to make the country green, it also has a national campaign that extends to the Diaspora, prompting Jewish people everywhere to plant trees, and in return they get a certificate and in the case of sizable donations a placard on a part of the forest.

I love the idea of planting trees, but one must know that there is more to the story that just putting a seedling in the ground. Coldplay learned that the hard way about 10 years ago when it worked with a tree-planting carbon offset company to offset the production of their album a Rush of Blood to the Head. The group bought 10,000 mango tree seedlings in India, but they died. Because when you plant trees, you have to consider who will take care of them, and how.

This is sort of why we love the idea of Treepex. The social startup is planting trees around the world (mine were just planted in Georgia) and is then giving customers the ability to login and follow the trees’ growth over their lifetime. The company connects tracking chips to the trees so if you want you can plant trees all around the world. Or companies can offset greenhouse gases by planting parks and forests.

Each tree has an NFC microchip monitoring its progress, according to Treepex. They call it the “API tackling deforestation,” which makes a lot of sense if you are a tech geek.

After you plant the tree, you can get photos, and updates as it grows over time. You can even visit individual trees.

What I like about the idea is that if you are American, you can support local tree planting too, with one of the Treepex locations being in California, to plant after massive deforestation from forest fires this summer. I like the idea about accountability, or at least the promise of it, and I also like the idea of creating more tree planters out there.

According to the company’s Georgian founder Bacho Khachidze, “Businesses of all shapes and sizes have used our API to create loyalty programs, automatically planting trees on behalf of their customers once they accrue enough points. Even hotels have started to adopt Treepex, enabling guests to plant trees when they book a room on their website.

“When you consider, for example, the recent wildfires in Northern California and the flourishing hotel trade in places like Napa and Sonoma, allowing hotel guests to gift a tree can help to gradually regenerate an otherwise ravaged ecosystem.”

Want to start planting our future? For $10, you can start here at the Treepex website.

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