(Athens) After devastating fires and a heatwave unprecedented in its duration in 2023, followed by the hottest winter ever recorded, Greece now fears suffering “a very difficult summer” on the forest fire front.
“No one can predict exactly what (weather) conditions we will face. But whatever they are, we will have to fight hard,” warned Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias in an interview with AFP.
“The summer will be very difficult,” he warned, while more than 30% of Greece’s territory is covered in forests, according to the World Bank.
Some 175,000 hectares of forests and agricultural land went up in smoke in 2023 and more than 20 people died.
Devastating fires raged last July during a two-week heat wave, the longest ever recorded in the country.
On this occasion, Greece set up the largest evacuation operation in its history, with 20,000 people, mainly tourists, forced to leave homes or vacation spots on the island of Rhodes (southeast).
The mercury had risen to 46 degrees in Gythion, in the Peloponnese peninsula (southwest).
Greece, a Mediterranean country accustomed to summer heat waves, then experienced “the hottest winter on record,” according to Costas Lagouvardos, research director at the Athens National Observatory.
While summer has not yet started, heat records for the first week of June were recorded on Tuesday, according to the meteo.gr website, with temperatures reaching 39.3°C locally.
“We see that in years when temperatures are high, which also means drought, we have large fires,” says Costas Lagouvardos.
Last August, a huge fire in Dadia National Park, close to the border with Turkey, was classified as the most destructive ever recorded in the EU.
This year, at the end of March, a fire broke out more than 1000 m above sea level, in the Pieria mountains.
This is “a major warning sign,” says Costas Lagouvardos.
The residents themselves could not believe that the fire could have started on previously snow-covered slopes, according to Nikolaos Roumeliotis, deputy fire chief.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), rising temperatures caused by human-caused fossil fuel emissions are lengthening the fire season and increasing the area burned.
“Since I have been studying forest fires, I do not remember seeing one so early in the year and at such an altitude,” also underlines Theodore Giannaros, fire meteorologist at the Athens Observatory.
“This is extremely worrying, because it shows that we are heading towards a hotter and drier climate,” he notes. “Key ecosystems that were less vulnerable to fires could gradually become more so,” he judges.
Between January and May, wildfires increased 28% year-over-year, according to firefighters.
By the end of April, a thousand fires had been recorded, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis recently lamented.
Faced with this threat, Greece has taken action and presented a €2.1 billion project to modernise its civil protection infrastructure, the most ambitious to date.
The country plans, thanks to funds largely from the EU, to equip itself from 2025 with new water bombers, helicopters, fire trucks, thermal cameras and more than a hundred drones. monitoring.
For Vassilis Kikilias, this year’s approach is to send water bombers as soon as a fire breaks out to buy time.
The authorities also organized a national emergency exercise bringing together firefighters, police and ambulance services.
But the recurring problem in Greece remains the lack of coordination between the services responsible for firefighting, experts deplore.
For Théodore Giannaros, who participates in the national committee responsible for establishing the daily map of fire risks, planning for the fight should begin in November, which is not the case.