Worries persist Greece not ready for repeat year of wildfires
23 January 2024
Published by: https://www.thenationalherald.com
GREECE – ATHENS – Deadly wildfires that struck Greece during a record summer heat wave are likely to recur despite a host of new government measures aimed at preventing them, warn environmentalists.
Speaking to The Parliament magazine, Pavlos Georgiadis – an international biodiversity and ecosystem restoration expert and Kostis Grimanis, an Athens-based climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace said that climate change forecasts for 2024 are especially worrisome for Greece.
https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/greece-wildfires-climate-change-europe
“Reports make mention of an up to 1.4C increase in the Earth’s temperature. If true, this will have devastating consequences for the Mediterranean, which is often referred to as a climate change hotspot and is warming 20 per cent faster than the global average,” Grimanis said. In 2023 a fire broke out two kilometers (1.2 miles) away from his house on the island of Zakynthos.
The 2023 fires destroyed more than 96,000 hectares (237,221 acres) killed at least 20 people and devastated the Dadia National Forest near the border with Turkey, with refugees among the victims.
There were fires around Athens and the islands of Corfu and Rhodes, where 19,000 tourists had to flee and complained of a lax response from the government while praising locals for helping them.
The European Union and other countries were pressed in action for what was said to be the biggest operation the bloc had ever conducted in firefighting and aiding beleaguered Greek fire crews and water-dropping aircraft.
“Nothing has happened in the direction of establishing a credible plan for climate adaptation or forest fire prevention, so I would not expect that, through some magical way, we are in any way protected from a new blaze,” Georgiadis said.
After the fires, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose New Democracy government had already bolstered firefighting crews and added aircraft – but blamed for not ensuring municipalities had clear forests of dry mass – announced a range of measures to detect and fight wildfires.
They include placing temperature measurement sensors and cameras on archaeological sites and in high-risk forests, recruiting 1,000 firefighters and 500 foresters, and the reforestation of 165,000 acres in the next two years.
“In the absence of a comprehensive climate adaptation policy, the Greek government is introducing piecemeal interventions, framing them as a war against nature – a battle it is likely to lose,” Georgiadis said.
“This strategy falls short of providing a systematic solution for long-term fire prevention and the prevention of desertification in Greece,” he said, although the government also set up a commission to deal with forests near the Evros River border with Turkey aimed at regenerating the forests and to attract tourists.
But Georgiadis is skeptical and said of the 16 members only two are natural scientists with any expertise in dealing with the problems and ideas for mitigation and solutions..
“All of them are connected to the government party; this is how things go in Greece,” he said. No restoration ecologists or wildlife biologists are represented – and no locals are involved.
