2023-07-20 15:03:33
Near Nea Peramos, west of Athens, July 19, 2023. LOUISA GOULIAMAKI / AFP
As Greece faces another heat wave, national weather services have warned of an increased risk of fires from Thursday July 20, with temperatures up to 44 degrees in some areas. Hundreds of Greek firefighters, aided by European contingents, appeared on Thursday to have contained the fires on the tourist island of Rhodes and west of Athens. But the toll is high: more than 170,000 hectares have gone up in smoke in three days, according to the European observatory Copernicus. And this new episode brings back the debate on the repeated fires that strike the country every summer.
On Wednesday, Efthymis Lekkas, professor of geology at the University of Athens, sounded the alarm on Skaï radio: “If this disaster continues, there will be an environmental collapse in Attica”the Athens region. “If we cannot save our last resources [naturelles]we will eventually experience desertification and Athens will look like Dubai”said the expert.
From Brussels where he was on Monday, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was quick to mention climate change: “We had, have and will have fires, it is also one of the consequences of the climate crisis that we are experiencing with increasing intensity”. According to a study by the independent research center Dianeosis from 2021, the number of days Greece will be hit by heat waves will increase by 15 to 20 days per year by 2050, and the number of high fire risk days will increase by between 15% and 70%. But for many conservationists, the lack of prevention and coordinated policy is also responsible for these repeated fires. “Every summer, the country is left to its fate. For forty years in Greece, fires have been a political problem, not a climatic one. But never (…) no one really takes the bull by the horns,” denounced on Tuesday the economic newspaper Naftemporiki.
Few funds for prevention
“The number of fires for twenty years has been stable in Greece. We have about 80 simultaneous fire starts at this time of year, but the intensity of these fires is greater”, notes Nikos Georgiadis, terrestrial program coordinator of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Greece. After several tragedies – the Mati fires in July 2018, a seaside resort near Athens, which caused the death of 102 people, and those of the summer of 2021, which saw more than 100,000 hectares go up in smoke, particularly on the island of Evia – the number of air resources has been reinforced, the training of firefighters improved, even if citizens in the disaster areas consider these reinforcements insufficient. “The real problem at the moment is the absence of a national fire prevention and plant waste management plan. [les branchages, les broussailles, tout ce qui peut être combustible en cette saison des feux] », analysis Nikos Georgiadis.
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