Written by Alexandros Avramidis
THERMAIC GULF, Greece (Reuters) – When Anastasios Zakalkas pulled the strings of his mussel farm in the Aegean Sea last month, the damage was clear: the lines were not overflowing with molluscs as they should be at harvest time but instead were full. cracked, empty shells.
It is the second time in three years that record sea temperatures have hit the mussel harvest in northern Greece, where farmers say they see a 90% drop in catches by 2024. The next one (LON:) the year will be a ghost again, said Zakalkas, because all the seeds of the next season also perished.
“The risk we faced (next year) was 100%,” said 35-year-old Zakalkas aboard his fishing boat on a calm morning in late October. “We don’t know how we will make a living in the new year. Our main activity is only shellfish,” he said.
Like other Mediterranean countries, Greece is highly vulnerable to climate change, which this year has led to months of above-average temperatures, punishing droughts and wildfires. Crops, including chestnuts, apples and cherries were hit. Scientists say extreme weather related to global warming could spell bad news for its aquaculture sector as well.
A series of heat waves hit Greece in July, sending sea temperatures in the Thermaic Gulf, an area that produces mussels, above 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) for days – too hot for mussels to survive.
Greece last saw a mussel die-off in 2021 but scientists predict it won’t happen again for another 10 years, said Kostas Koukaras, a marine biologist.
“This shows, even to the most skeptical, that the climate has arrived,” he said.
As world leaders prepare to meet in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku for this month’s UN climate conference COP29 – dubbed the “climate finance COP” – Koukaras said governments should help producers deal with climate-related costs.
“We are very close to the collapse of mussel farming in Greece, so the state needs to support these people,” he said.
Greece’s aquaculture production was worth more than 619 million euros in 2021, third in Europe after France and Spain, according to the Hellenic Aquaculture Producers Organization (HAPO). It is among Europe’s largest producers of Mediterranean mussels and exports almost all of the 20,000 tons grown annually by small family businesses.
Spain has also seen the death of mussels, although Koukaras says that the Greek sector has been hit harder because almost all of its farms are concentrated in the same region.
For the 100 or so families who farm mussels in the small town of Zakalkas, Kymina, the future looks bleak. They are looking for government compensation to pay their debts, while others are looking for work in factories, he said.
“We are afraid,” said Sotiris Tsaros, another mussel farmer. “If this happens again next year, we will all be gone and everything I have done as a farmer for the last 30 years will be gone.”
