Greece is investing €2.1 billion ($2.27 billion) to guard the nation from pure disasters brought on by local weather change as wildfires are already breaking out forward of fireside season, which usually begins in Could.
The Aegis program is the primary of its type in Greece. In keeping with Panagiotis Stampoulidis, the manager director of the Hellenic Republic Asset Growth Fund, which can oversee procurement for it, it can even be Greece’s biggest-ever procurement program. The initiative will present new and upgraded gear to the Ministry of Civil Safety, together with amphibious firefighting aircrafts, drones for aerial monitoring, hearth detection and extinguishing programs, hearth management facilities and greater than 1,000 firefighting autos.
Key procurement tasks might be dealt with by HRADF’s Challenge Preparation Facility, or PPF, which has a €592 million finances and to this point has issued 16 tenders. In whole, HRADF is managing a portfolio of tasks for Aegis that quantity to about €970 million, Stampoulidis mentioned in an interview in Athens.
Local weather change-related fires have been a major problem for Greece lately. In 2023, wildfires scorched nearly 675 sq. miles of forest, or 1.3% of the nation’s whole land space. That’s up from a median of slightly below 168 sq. miles a 12 months between 2006 and 2022, in keeping with the European Union’s European Forest Hearth Info System.
Final August, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis pledged to improve the nation’s technological toolkit for stopping wildfires after Greece suffered probably the most fire-related destruction in 16 years.
Round 19,000 individuals, together with hundreds of vacationers, had been evacuated the month prior from components of the island of Rhodes after wildfires broke out amid a warmth wave that set temperature information throughout southern Europe.
Aegis’s intention is to guard human life, property, forests and the nation’s pure magnificence and ecology amid mounting local weather threats, Local weather Change and Civil Safety Minister Vasilis Kikilias mentioned final week. Funding for this system comes from the EU’s Restoration and Resilience Facility, the Nationwide Strategic Reference Framework and the European Funding Financial institution, he mentioned.
HRADF additionally has a finances of €198 million this 12 months for the Anti-Nero III program, which helps wildfire prevention measures corresponding to cleansing forests, upgrading and sustaining forest entry roads and creating and sustaining anti-fire zones.
Anti-Nero III, which is already underway for 2024, covers the cleansing of greater than 14,300 acres of forest and offers for the creation and upkeep of just about 20,000 acres of fireside prevention zones.
In the meantime, the outlook for this 12 months’s wildfire season, which traditionally runs from Could to October, is grim. Together with its southern European neighbors, Greece has been affected by ongoing drought circumstances, in keeping with the European Union’s Copernicus service, which regularly result in extra fires.
Within the second 10-day interval of March, our #EDO CDI confirmed that Southern Europe, notably the #Mediterranean area, continued to be affected by #drought circumstances 🚱
🔴Alert circumstances endured in southern #Italy 🇮🇹 and #Spain 🇪🇸
Extra at👇https://t.co/jbAFISFCQT pic.twitter.com/XxnzujTvKy
— Copernicus EMS (@CopernicusEMS) March 28, 2024
Over a 12 hour-period on April 6, 71 bush and forest fires broke out throughout the nation, in keeping with the Local weather Change and Civil Safety Ministry, which elevated the nationwide hearth alert warning to the second-highest degree. Villages on the island of Crete had been amongst these evacuated after a fireplace unfold in a forested a part of the Lasithi area.
Crews had been eradicating pure and man-made particles in forests throughout the nation over the previous few weeks to forestall such a catastrophe, Stampoulidis mentioned.
“Additional crews will start operating in more forests very soon and their work will be completed by July. Their presence in forest areas is a preventive measure in itself. In 2022 and 2023, in areas where crews operated, no fires broke out,” he mentioned.
