Jaime Martínez-Urtaza, climate change expert: “We will have to get used to living at 50 degrees”

Forest fires are one of the most serious consequences of the heat wave in Spain. The territory and the day to day has been affected by high temperatures, a consequence of climate change. In recent days, two workers have died during the working day from exposure to extreme temperatures. Experts indicate that forest fires will be increasingly dangerous, intense and extensive due to climate change, extinction efforts are more difficult due to high temperatures.

Faced with record-breaking temperatures not only in Spain, but in many European countries, climate change expert and advisor to FAO and WHO, Jaime Martínez-Urtaza, explains the situation of record temperatures that we are living.

Jaime Martínez-Urtaza explains that climate change is behind what we are living, behind “environmental conditions”. He also highlights “another set of factors that are influencing, because more fires not only depends on high temperatures, it is also a question of forests and factors such as negligence”. ” Although behind all this, and behind many things that are happening every day, are the new conditions that is propitiating climate change,” he adds.

The expert gives a series of keys on how to learn to live with these new record temperatures, which is “a tremendously complex issue that covers all scales of society”. ” What we have to do is learn to live in a different world, change our habits and change the way we live,” he says.

“We face a future and a present, because climate change is already here and affects our lives, What we have to do is, as quickly as possible, change habits to adapt to this new situation. And what is more important, to educate the new generations, because I think it is important that they begin to understand the dimension of the problem and live in a different way,” explained Jaime Martínez-Urtaza.

Martínez-Urtaza asserts that he has no doubt that we will have to get used to living with 50 degrees of temperature. ” We’re around 47, 48 in some places. Also in the UK, records are breaking at over 40 degrees. I think we need to look at areas in the southern US and northern Mexico, where this temperature is common in summers and see how they live”. ” We could learn a lot from them and how they have adapted to these conditions”, concludes the FAO and WHO advisor.