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

Europe is spending tens of billions of euros a year to fight wildfires, yet it hasn’t stopped blazes from flaring up across Greece and other parts of the continent this summer.This week fires on the outskirts of Athens engulfed more than 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres) — about double the size of Manhattan. The flames forced thousands of people across the Attica region, which surrounds the city, to evacuate. More than 700 firefighters, dozens of planes and helicopters and around 200 firefighting vehicles were deployed to extinguish the inferno.While Greece successfully snuffed out the flames this week, the herculean effort shows the uphill battle European firefighters face as climate change turbo-charges the threat posed by wildfires. Greece, which is suffering its worst season in two decades, now has 89 planes and helicopters available for firefighting, compared to 61 when the current government came to power 2019. Still, there is increasing pressure on European governments to focus more on prevention as extreme heat and fires become more frequent due to global warming."We don’t expect the solution to just come out of thin air,” Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Wednesday. "Very important work needs to be done in the area of prevention. I think we have laid some important first foundations in this direction.”From the start of May to August 13 this year, Greece has seen 3,543 wildfires compared with 2,344 over the same period in 2023. The government announced Friday projects worth €4.3bn ($4.7bn) for climate mitigation and adaptation, with some new initiatives aimed at protecting forests and reducing fire risks.A firefighting helicopter collects water from the sea east of Athens, on August 13. Photographer: Ioana Epure/BloombergWildfires cost Europe at least €4.1bn in damages last year, charring about 500,000 hectares of land across the continent. Last summer Greece saw the largest wildfire ever recorded in Europe. Spain, Italy and Portugal also suffered significant damage. As the climate crisis has escalated, the European Union has increased its firefighting budget, which rose about 35% in five years to €37.8bn ($42bn) in 2022. This year the bloc has put dozens of planes and hundreds of firefighters on standby in anticipation of an intense wildfire season.Even countries as far north as the UK are on alert for wildfires this summer due to recent heat waves. Hina Bokhari, chair of the London Assembly’s fire committee, said there are worries of a repeat of the blazes 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 it will be increasing the potential risk for wildfires, even in cities like London, then we are not going to be ready for another horrible incident like what we had in 2022,” she said.In April, Greece said it was investing in amphibious firefighting aircrafts, drones for aerial monitoring and other fire detection and extinguishing systems as part of a €2.1bn procurement program to battle the impacts of climate change.Mitsotakis said an order for firefighting planes from Canada isn’t being fulfilled as quickly as many people would like to see because the factory that made them was shut for years."We took the lead in having a large order from Europe, so that the production line could be moved forward,” he said. "Certainly for the next three years we will have to make do with what we have.”The European Commission also announced it will be injecting €600mn more into its aerial firefighting capacity and has placed an order for 12 amphibious firefighting planes from the Canadian Commercial Corporation. Yet the first batch of these new planes are not expected to be delivered until the end of 2027. For this fire season, rescEU, the bloc’s civil protection mechanism, have more than 20 planes stationed across 10 member states.The European Union spends about 90% of its wildfire budget on fighting fires rather than prevention, according to a report published in October 2023 by the Institute for European Environmental Policy.Theodoros Kolydas, director of Greece’s National Meteorological Center, said preventative measures could include replanting forests with less flammable trees. Greece, for example, should replant its highly combustible pine forests with oak trees, he said.Other experts have argued that urban sprawl into forest habitats is also a cause of the problem and should be halted. More than a third of the forest area of Attica, a region including all of the Athens metropolitan area, has burned over the past eight years.Still, the fires in Greece this week could have been much worse without the prevention measures and technology that have been put in place this year. Despite the dangers posed by the fires this week, there was only one fatality. A message alert system, introduced in 2019, likely helped prevent more deaths. The use of drones has also helped spot blazes that are likely to get out of control."This is a total effort in a time of great climate crisis, which I think we are all experiencing,” Mitsotakis said. "We must constantly become better. And from any failure of ours, or from any fire that escapes, [we must] always look to learn what we can do better.”