Greece experienced 3,543 wildfires between January 1 and May 1, a rise of 22 percent compared to last year’s 2,907 blazes, according to the Fire Service, which is bracing for a very difficult season.
What is causing particular alarm is that “some of these fires displayed characteristics similar to blazes we would expect during the summer,” Theodore Giannaros, an expert at the National Observatory of Athens (NOA), told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency.
“We are also very alarmed by the fact that we had a blaze at a very high altitude in the Pierian Mountains, which should have been covered by snow that would have prevented such a fire from starting,” he added.
The head of research at the NOA, Kostas Lagouvardos added that low rainfall over the past few months is also compounding fears, with the European Drought Observatory having already issued a warning for Greece.
“A difficult season” for Greece
Last winter was the warmest since modern records began in 1960, according to the National Observatory of Athens, which analyzed European Union satellite data. The six warmest Greek winters on record have occurred in the past decade.
That’s against the backdrop of new data revealing that Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, its temperatures rising at roughly twice the global average.
Vassilis Kikilias, the minister for climate crisis and civil protection, says authorities expect annual conditions to worsen further. “It will be a very difficult fire season, a very difficult summer,” says Kikilias. “We had a dry winter and fall temperatures lasting until December. So we’re facing the climate crisis head on,” he told the Associated Press recently.
Wildfires ravaged Greece in 2023
Greece was hit by hundreds of wildfires last summer. The country witnessed was the largest wildfire in Europe since records began in 2000 in the region of Evros, north-east Greece.
According to a European Union official, the megafire decimated more than 96,000 hectares, an area bigger than the Berlin metropolitan region, and killed at least 20 people. The fires mostly affected Greece’s biggest Natura 2000 site, the Dadia National Park in Evros.
Yet this protected area was not the only area to go up in flames. Over the summer, among others, the Attica region and the holiday islands of Rhodes and Corfu were hit.
This year, Greece is doubling the number of firefighters in specialized units to some 1,300, and adopting tactics from the United States to try and outflank fires with airborne units scrambled to build breaks in the predicted path of the flames.
Crew members include forestry experts and firefighters with varied skills, many developed in training with colleagues in France, Spain and the United States.
Mostly funded by the European Union, Greece has launched a €2.1 billion program to overhaul its disaster response capability, ordering new water-dropping aircraft, drones, fire trucks, training facilities, and an artificial intelligence-driven sensor network to detect early signs of smoke and flooding.
But the new equipment won’t start arriving until 2025. Greek authorities are doubling down on training and new firefighting methods, with another tough season expected this year.