How will climate change affect vacations in Greece?

Iakovos, Camille and their team are based in western Crete, the island where Iakovos was born. They run Active Crete, our local partners for vacations on the island, including this popular painting vacation. They’ve seen climate change affect the island in recent years.

“In the past the weather has changed gradually, getting warmer, warmer, warmer in the summer, then cooler slower and gradually,” says Iakovos. “But now there are sudden changes. The maximum temperature one day will be 22°C, another day, the maximum is 30°C; within one day it changes five degrees. This didn’t happen at all in the past.”

The changes in weather directly affect tourists caught in heatwaves, but also indirectly, through rising food prices.

“The winters are unpredictable and that affects the agricultural production – which then has a knock-on effect on tourism,” says Camille. “Last year the olive production was down and prices shot up; that has an effect on tavernas and the prices for tourists.”

The couple live in a beautiful part of Crete, close to the town of Kissamos on the north-west coast. The area is surrounded by rare endemic Cretan wildlife; the government has recently stopped putting umbrellas on the beach, as they damage the rare lilies that grow there.

This area lies within the Natura 2000 protected areas– an EU-wide network that protects some 18 percent of land in EU member states. Climate change poses an even bigger risk to nature than tourism. “The swallow population has gone down,” says Camille. “Even five years ago they used to congregate on the telegraph wires and now there are far fewer. And we have new species in the sea – we’ve had fish from the Red Sea observed by fishermen.”

“There are pockets of sustainability and awareness but there’s also an old-fashioned kind of conservationism here, too,” the couple say. Whilst the vast majority of Greeks consider climate change to be humanity’s biggest current challenge, it’s not always reflected in local attitudes towards sustainability.

Iakovos and Camille have always operated vacations for us that are designed to protect the environment as much as possible. They do beach clean ups out of season. The vacations operate almost entirely on foot and by bus; they only bring small groups that don’t overwhelm the local community. Like many Cretan houses, their properties operate on solar power, and they’ve considered all their emissions, down to the non-polluting thinning agents they use on their painting vacations.

“The good thing about our team’s monitoring is that we get to see more than we look for – a few years back we saw a lionfish, and now they seem to be everywhere,” says Ted. On the nearby island of Paxos, restaurants have added invasive lionfish, rabbitfish, cornetfish and Atlantic blue crab to their menus, as part of an ‘Eat an Alien’ campaign by conservation organisation iSea. This encourages local people and vacationmakers to eat these invasive species, where before fishers would have had to throw them away.

Kalamos doesn’t suffer from wildfires as much as other parts of Greece. Wildfires are often started deliberately so that land can be redeveloped, but can quickly get out of control in hot, dry conditions. “No-one is really interested in starting a fire here,” says Ted, “All the land is private so if you start a fire you won’t be able to get the land.”

For volunteers, the main and most noticeable risk on Kalamos is the heat. “People believe it’s getting warmer. The heatwaves are becoming more frequent. You get these extreme events that last a lot longer – an extensive heatwave for a month – we’re not supposed to get that very often.”

Extreme heat can cause problems on volunteering vacations, where you might expect to do physical tasks. “There are times when I can’t have people doing things as the law won’t let me – there’s a ban on doing outdoor work in extreme heat. It’s very rare that they implement it, but they did it last year,” says Ted.

However, these trips have been designed to adapt to the heat whenever possible – as people have always done on the Greek islands.

“In summer I generally keep the volunteers closer to the water – so they always have somewhere cool,” Ted says. There are sites on the island that simply aren’t worked on in summer. Instead, it’s all about the water – like monitoring the island’s precious seagrass.

“We don’t do seagrass monitoring in the winter as you’d need wetsuits and the weather is bad,” says Ted. “We do more things like that in the summer and it works very well.”