By Can Öztaş
This summer, Turkey’s coast mostly held. A fire near Fethiye, a scare in Antalya’s Kepez district, a few homes emptied as a precaution and their residents returned to within a day. After last year, it has the feel of a reprieve, which is the most dangerous weather the region knows. Because we have all seen what the season can do.
This year the images come from France and Spain. The sky changes, next the air and then the light. Roads begin filling in one direction while helicopters and planes move in the other. Beaches become evacuation points. Pine forests and olive groves disappear behind a curtain no photograph can fully capture. By morning, centuries-old landscape has become memory.
The remarkable thing is not that this happens. It is that we continue to behave as though it belongs to the realm of surprise.
It is tempting to treat each catastrophe as a local story, a particular encounter between heat, wind, negligence and bad luck. Yet every summer the same images travel around the Mediterranean. They may begin along Turkey’s southern coast, or in Greece, Italy, France, Spain or on the shores of North Africa. Different governments confront them, but the landscape appears not to notice the borders.
THE SEASON WE KNOW
Not every fire can be prevented. Climate change brings hotter, drier and longer summers, making whatever begins harder to contain. Yet this is no unfamiliar danger. The countries of the region lived through it last year, and the year before that. Experience accumulates. Preparedness does not always keep pace.
Effective response requires more than emergency mobilization. It requires permanent capacity, research, equipment, trained personnel and sustained investment long before the hills begin to burn.
Every lasting technological success begins with a political decision. Long before it becomes an aircraft, a satellite or a drone, it exists as a budget line, a research program and a strategic priority. Preparing for a changing climate requires the same patience. The emergency may arrive in summer, but the preparation begins years earlier.
The real test of resilience continues after the flames. Rebuilding forests is one task. Rebuilding public confidence is another.
In Turkey, every major fire is followed by a familiar debate. Allegations and denials emerge over the future of burned land. Questions are raised about construction, tourism, mining and commercial interests. The government points to the constitutional obligation to reforest burned areas. Critics look at the wider pressures upon forest land and remain unconvinced.
Every fire therefore leaves behind two landscapes. One is blackened earth. The other is political. It is filled with questions about what will happen next, who will decide and whom the future use of the land may serve. Public maps of burned areas, transparent reforestation records, open land-use decisions: none of these would end suspicion. They would only let the argument rest on evidence rather than mood. Forests take decades to recover. Trust has rarely shown greater speed.
ANOTHER SCRIPT
This is where COP31 offers a moment, though not an uncomplicated one. Turkey will host COP31 in Antalya. Australia will preside over its negotiations. The geography is Turkish. The diplomacy is shared.
The gathering in Antalya will look far beyond wildfires and the Mediterranean. Climate change is planetary, and fires now scar landscapes from California and Canada to Chile and Australia.
Turkey could use COP31 to encourage a stronger global framework for wildfire cooperation, one that allows regions facing similar risks to learn from one another rather than rediscover the same lessons alone.
Such cooperation would not require Mediterranean countries to resolve their disagreements over borders, migration, energy, maritime zones or history. They may continue those quarrels with the stamina the region has cultivated over centuries. They might nevertheless recognize that smoke does not pause at a contested boundary to request diplomatic clearance.
Much of the knowledge and technology already exists in scattered forms. What is missing is the political ambition to connect it, strengthen it and make cooperation permanent rather than improvised after the first emergency call.
This could become part of Antalya’s legacy. It need not belong to Turkey alone, but hosting COP31 gives Turkey the opportunity to begin the conversation and invite others to carry it further.
Every summer writes the same script because politics has yet to write another one.
