Europe’s $42 billion effort to fight fires is an uphill battle

Europe spends tens of billions of euros a year to fight wildfires, but it hasn’t stopped fires raging in Greece and other parts of the continent this summer.

This week, fires on the outskirts of Athens have burned more than 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres), about twice the size of Manhattan. The flames forced thousands of people in the Attica region, which surrounds the city, to evacuate. More than 700 firefighters, dozens of planes and helicopters and about 200 fire engines were deployed to extinguish the inferno.

While Greece successfully extinguished the flames this week, the Herculean effort shows the uphill battle facing European firefighters as climate change turbo-charges the threat posed by wildfires. Greece, suffering its worst season in two decades, now has 89 planes and helicopters available to fight fires, up from 61 when the current government came to power in 2019. However, there is growing pressure great pressure on European governments to focus more on prevention as an extreme. heat and fires are becoming more common due to global warming.

“We don’t expect the solution to come out of thin air,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Wednesday. “Very important work must be done in the field of prevention. I think we’ve laid some important foundations in that direction.”

From the beginning of May to August 13 this year, Greece recorded 3,543 fires, compared with 2,344 in the same period in 2023. The government on Friday announced €4.3 billion ($4.7 billion) worth of projects to mitigate and climate adaptation, with some new initiatives. intended to protect forests and reduce fire risks.

Forest fires cost Europe at least €4.1 billion in damage last year, charring about 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of land across the continent. Last summer, Greece experienced the largest fire ever recorded in Europe. Spain, Italy and Portugal also suffered significant damage. As the climate crisis escalated, the European Union increased its firefighting budget, which has risen by about 35 percent over five years to €37.8 billion ($42 billion) in 2022. This year, the bloc put dozens of planes and hundreds of firefighters on standby. in anticipation of an intense fire season.

Even countries as far north as the UK are on alert for bushfires this summer due to recent heatwaves. Hina Bokhari, chair of the London Assembly’s fire committee, said there were concerns about a repeat of the fires that blackened parts of the city in 2022.

“If we are not honest about the fact that climate change is having a massive impact and will increase the potential risk of fires, even in cities like London, then we will not be prepared for another horrific incident like the one in 2022,” he said. it.

In April, Greece said it was investing in amphibious firefighting aircraft, aerial monitoring drones and other fire detection and suppression systems as part of a €2.1bn procurement program to combat the impact of the changes climatic.

Mitsotakis said an order for firefighting planes from Canada is not being fulfilled as quickly as many people would like to see because the factory that produced them has been closed for years.

“We have taken the lead to have a large order from Europe so that the production line can be moved further,” he said. “Certainly for the next three years we’re going to have to make do with what we have.”

The European Commission has also announced that it will inject another €600 million into its firefighting capacity and has placed an order for 12 amphibious firefighting aircraft from the Canadian Commercial Corporation. However, the first batch of these new planes is not expected to be delivered until the end of 2027. For this fire season, rescEU, the bloc’s civil protection mechanism, has more than 20 planes stationed in 10 member states.

The European Union spends about 90% of its budget on fires, fighting them rather than preventing them, according to a report published in October 2023 by the Institute for European Environment Policy.

Theodoros Kolydas, director of Greece’s National Meteorological Center, said preventive measures could include replanting forests with less flammable trees. Greece, for example, should replant its highly combustible pine forests with oaks, he said.

Other experts have argued that urban sprawl into forest habitats is also a cause of the problem and should be stopped. More than a third of the forest area in Attica, a region that includes the entire metropolitan area of ​​Athens, has burned in the past eight years.

However, the fires in Greece this week could have been much worse without the prevention measures and technology that were put in place this year. Despite the dangers posed by this week’s fires, there has been only one fatality. A text alert system introduced in 2019 likely helped prevent more deaths. The use of drones has also helped identify fires that are likely to get out of control.

“This is an all-out effort at a time of great climate crisis, which I think we’re all facing,” Mitsotakis said. “We have to constantly get better. And from any failure of ours, or from any fire that escapes, (we must) always seek to learn what we can do better.”

Photo: A firefighter tries to control a wildfire near Athens on August 12, 2024. Photo credit: Nick Paleologos/Bloomberg

TOPICS
Catastrophe Natural disasters Fire Europe