Greece facing ‘ecological disaster’ from wildfires: Mitsotakis

Hundreds of firefighters battled yesterday to contain new flare-ups in wildfire-ravaged areas of Greece, where summer infernos have caused what the prime minister described as the country’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades”.
Rain overnight in some areas and falling temperatures appeared to have eased the situation after two weeks of devastating blazes, and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said “we can be more optimistic today”.
But weeks of scorching summer weather lie ahead.
Greece’s worst heatwave in decades has fanned blazes that have destroyed more than 100,000 hectares of forests and farmland, the country’s worst wildfire damage since 2007, the European Forest Fire Information System said yesterday.
The fires have left three dead, hundreds homeless, forced thousands to flee, and caused economic and environmental devastation.
Greece is just one of a number of countries in the Mediterranean region that have been hit by a savage fire season which authorities have blamed on climate change.
Yesterday Mitsotakis described the “mega fires” as Greece’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades”.
“The climate crisis is here ... and it tells us that everything must change,” he told reporters, pointing to other devastating fires in Turkey, Italy and Algeria.
“We managed to protect thousands of people. But we lost forests and properties,” he said, vowing to overhaul the country’s civil protection authority.
Mitsotakis said that 150 homes have been destroyed in greater Athens over the last week, while the count is ongoing on the island of Evia, which accounts for more than half of the area burned nationwide.
The prime minister has been placed on the defensive after his government as recently as June was assuring Greeks that the country was fully prepared to face the coming fire season.
However, he was forced to admit yesterday: “It seemed that this particular phenomenon exceeded our capabilities and the preparations put in place.”
Main opposition leader Alexis Tsipras argued that Mitsotakis had “failed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster ... and the scope of his responsibilities”.
“Pain, sadness, rage, anger are all mixed, when you see your business that has been set up for 38 years turning to ashes in half an hour, you cannot describe how you feel,” said Zoe Charasti, who owned a bakery shop in the village of Rovies. “The anger and rage is huge.”
At the height of the fires in early August, the flames had reached the gates of Athens, filling the sky of the city of 4mn inhabitants with grey smoke.
But after weeks of punishing temperatures often well over 40° Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), temperatures dropped yesterday.
The latest extreme weather events come after a “code red” report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published on Monday warning that the world is warming far faster than previously feared.
The Mediterranean has been singled out as a “climate change hotspot”, with increasing temperatures and aridity lengthening fire seasons, according to a draft IPCC assessment seen exclusively by AFP.
Algeria announced three days of national mourning for the 69 killed in blazes there (see page 5).
In Italy, 48.8C (119.8F) was registered in Sicily on Wednesday – beating the previous high registered in Greece in 1977 in what is believed to be a new European record.
Firefighters said they had battled more than 500 blazes overnight as another death was reported, taking the total toll linked to wildfires to four over the past week.
Regional authorities in Sicily have declared a state of emergency as a result of the fires, while 50 voluntary firefighting teams from around Italy have flown in to help battle the blazes.
The fire service reported some 100 interventions overnight in Calabria, with particularly difficult blazes in the areas of Reggio Calabria, Catanzaro and Cosenza.
In Spain, dozens of firefighters backed by four water-dropping aircraft were on the scene of a blaze in the northeastern province of Tarragona which has so far destroyed some 40 hectares (100 acres) of protected forest, local officials said.
Two smaller fires were burning in the northern wine-producing region of La Rioja and the northeastern province of Zaragoza, which involved two planes.
The wildfires come as temperatures were forecast to reach highs of around 40C (104F) in much of Spain and neighbouring Portugal in the coming days.
The mercury could hit the mid-40s in some areas of southern Spain.
All but three of Spain’s 17 regions were on alert for heat while Portugal’s weather office warned that the centre and north of the country as well as parts of the southern Algarve province were on “maximum” alert for wildfires.
In 2017, fires killed dozens of people in Portugal.
In Russia, the head of a Siberian region has declared today a non-working day and urged residents to stay at home as smoke from raging forest fires raise health concerns.
In recent years, wildfires have ripped across Russia’s vast territory at an unprecedented scale that experts blame on climate change, negligence and underfunded forestry management services.
The head of Yakutia – Russia’s largest and coldest region that has been hard-hit by wildfires this year – said yesterday that the day off would apply to the regional capital Yakutsk and several other districts.