How Spain is trying to adapt to more frequent heatwaves
Spaniards have spent the past week behind closed shutters in almost total darkness to shelter from the baking heat.
Fans buzz; air-conditioning is turned up full blast. School children are sent home from sweltering classrooms while bird chicks are tumbling from nests to their deaths as they try to escape temperatures soaring above 40°C.
In northern Spain, hundreds of firefighters have been battling four forest blazes in Navarre and another two in Catalonia.
As the country melts in its earliest heatwave in over 40 years, analysts say Spain must adapt to a new reality of earlier heatwaves with longer droughts.
The root cause of the world's changing weather has been blamed on climate change, experts say, and its secondary effects could change daily life for millions of Spaniards.
“Spain could be one of the worst affected by climate change along with other parts of southern Europe. Now we are in mid-June, and we are already in a heatwave. We cannot say if we will see 50°C yet but it is a possibility,” Ruben Del Campo, a forecaster with Spain's state meteorological agency, Aemet, told Euronews.
“Another effect will be drought. Forest fires are not caused by climate change. But high temperatures, wind and lack of humidity mean forest fires are more difficult to control.”
Del Campo said Spain must plan ahead for its new reality of earlier heatwaves that have left the country suffocating, even before summer officially starts on 21 June.
“We have to prepare ourselves for these heatwaves arriving earlier and these temperatures are going to last longer. We have to adapt more to this reality."
Meteorologists define arid areas of countries as those which have insufficient rainfall to support agriculture.
Del Campo said many parts of North
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