‘We are destroyed’: Greek islanders say cost of wildfires will stretch far into the future

Dwarfed by the silhouette remains of a torched forest, Giorgios explains how he has lost 50 years – or two whole generations – of income to the wildfires that burned his home for seven days and seven nights.

The father of three lives on Greece’s second-largest island, Evia, a quarter of which is now a devastated, burnt wasteland.

The tidal wave of flames consumed Giorgios’s home, his warehouse of tools, and all of his nearly 3,000 pine trees, whose resin he cultivated for a living.

The fire was among more than 60 major wildfires that have broken out across Greece in the last few months, destroying well over 130,000 hectares of forest, 10 times the yearly average, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.

“Every one of my trees will have to be cut down and replanted. It will take 50 years to do that,” says Giorgios, desperate in the detonating sunlight.

He fears many others will have to leave Evia as a whole way of living will end.

“Nothing can be salvaged; there are no animals, not even oxygen.

“We’re talking generations gone. How do you calculate that loss?”

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Behind him, an apocalypse yawns across the horizon: Giacometti trees march down charred hillsides and spill into clusters of smouldering villages. In one, near to a church that looks like it has been hit by an airstrike, bewildered inhabitants pick through aid deliveries.

Notably absent is the gentle hum of wildlife, most of it wiped out in horrific scenes captured on mobile-phone videos. The island is famous for its bees, and reportedly produced 60 per cent of Greece’s pine honey – an industry now devastated. It is eerily quiet, except for the sound of a distant fire truck wailing its way south, where fresh wildfires have erupted.

The sound echoes across the narrow Euripus Strait, northwest of the capital Athens, where new fires have also begun to rage, sending towering columns of smoke into the air, which in the evening form hallucinogenic sunsets of bruised neon.

But Greece, for all the horror, is not an exception. Rather, it is part of a nightmare unfurling across the world right now, providing a grim glimpse into the future of what is coming to all of us.

It is a vision that experts warn will be the “new normal”, particularly in the Mediterranean basin, where fires right now are raging from the French Riveria to Algeria (where 75 people have been killed).

The triggers for the fires are accidents or arson, and dozens have been arrested across the region in connection with individual incidents. But experts agree that whatever the match is, the fuel is the manmade climate crisis and its soaring temperatures.

Professor Richard Best, head of climate impacts research at the UK’s Met Office, tells The Independent that one of the chief factors are droughts which are increasing in many parts of the world.

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“This is particularly important in the Mediterranean, where there has not been a detectable trend in meteorological drought, ie low rainfall, but there has been a very clear trend in ecological drought: reduced soil moisture due to higher evaporation,” he says.

This is fast parching the landscape which, when whipped by hot winds, creates a perfect tinderbox.

And so it is no coincidence that as the fires broke out in Greece as it simmered through its worst heatwave in three decades.

In Italy, where major wildfires have burned over 150,000 hectares of land, temperatures were so high that they reached 48.8C in Sicily last week. The Met Office said that this was probably Europe’s hottest ever day, warning that we need to prepare for 50-degree heat being a regular occurrence.

In fact, this July was the hottest month ever recorded on earth, according to the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And so this problem stretches well beyond the Mediterranean.

Worsening drought and heat have fuelled record wildfires in the western United States, and in Russia’s northern Siberia region, where swathes of land have been on fire for a staggering two months.

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Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), tells The Independent that this is what makes 2021 unprecedented.

In all the years he has been monitoring global wildfires, he says, it is unusual to see so many fires rage for so long on both sides of the Arctic Ocean and in Europe, simultaneously.

“The different locations all at once show the persistence of the fires is unprecedented,” he says. “Six of the worst fires in California’s history have been in the last 12 months. June and July set records in terms of burn area and estimated [global] emissions.”

The problems go beyond the actual flames. Air pollution “has no borders”, adds Parrington, warning that while fires can be contained locally, the impact chokes neighbouring countries, making fires an international problem regardless of individual states’ fire risk.

For example, in Greece, the total carbon emissions from the wildfires during just the first two weeks of August is fast reaching the 3.7 megatonnes of carbon emitted during the whole of August in 2007, which was a record year. That smog is already drifting across borders and smothering neighbouring states that have so far been fire-free. In the Sakha republic in Russia the estimated emissions from fires are double last year’s.

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All this means we “must adapt”, adds Professor Best.

“People will need to be more aware of fire risks and take appropriate steps to protect themselves,” he says. Governments have to educate and invest.

This sentiment is keenly felt on Evia, where the authorities have faced mounting criticism from inhabitants who accuse them of not responding fast enough to the fires and not investing enough in fire prevention and response. The government has defended its actions, saying the situation was impossible as fires were being fought across three major areas of the country, including land near the capital.

In Giorgios’s village, where 20 houses and a church burned, a wall is scrawled with graffiti reading: “You didn’t give money to firefighting equipment, you should have sent the riot police to put out the villages,” referring to the government’s investment in policing.

There, an elderly member of the village, also called Giorgios, 84, says residents were not given any warning to evacuate by the state but instead fled in their own cars, after someone rang the church bell.

“I have gone through war but I have never seen such a scale of disaster. I saw death approaching,” he said, adding the only time he has had to evacuate this village was during the Greek civil war in the 1940s.

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A few doors down, Thanasis says firefighters “had to wait for aerial reinforcements, which only came when the flames were 50m high. We didn’t even receive an alert message that other villages did.”

A few kilometres away, the same sentiment is expressed by a local community leader who claims the authorities waited until 40km of land was on fire before they intervened.

“They had no plan at the start or when it expanded. And so everything is eviscerated, wild boar burned, beehives, tortoises burned. There is nothing now.”

Ioannis Kontzias, mayor of Istiaia Edipsos, another affected area on Evia, said he had to send in local men with tractors to evacuate some areas and compared the scenes to Dante’s inferno.

The government has said its resources were stretched to the limit with so many fires happening simultaneously, meaning it had to call for international support. About 24 European and Middle Eastern countries responded, sending planes, helicopters, vehicles and hundreds of firefighters.

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Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has even described the fires as the greatest ecological disaster his country has witnessed in decades.

“The situation we are facing is unprecedented for the country,” government spokesperson Giannis Oikonomou said during a recent press briefing.

“The fight we are waging on this front is threefold: extinguishing the fires, preventing new outbreaks, and repairing damage and compensating those affected.”

Greek fire department chiefs told The Independent lessons need to be learned from 2021 both in Greece and abroad, and alongside urgent and dramatic changes to tackle climate change there needed to be more investment in national and international firefighting capabilities.

Joint training in Europe is not enough, says Konstantinos Pachidis, a fire major-general who has been manning the response in Evia. He said they needed to expand cooperation to include other Mediterranean countries like Tunisia, Algeria and Lebanon where wildfires have also engulfed lands. He said there needed to be new initiatives to come up with fire prevention.

“We need more resources, more equipment, more staff because the future is dark,” he adds.

“There needs to be more global investment in international cooperation for firefighting.  We need to change our planning. We need groundbreaking new ideas as a country, as a European Union, as a world.” For those on Evia, they say it is too late, their lives are already ruined, whole livelihoods have been wiped out for decades to come. They also fear flooding in winter as the trees, which would have prevented landslides, have all gone.

“Even if we do manage to rebuild. We are worried about the wildfires and floods of the future, if we base our livelihoods on the earth, on the forests,” Giorgos says, moving through the skeletal forest of charcoal.

“For now, how will we live? We raise up our hands. We are destroyed. Destroyed.”