Wherever you look in Europe these days, especially in the south countries, large and smaller fires are raging. Flames swallow forests, destroy crops, animals and human lives, threatening cities and villages. It is not yet over the summer, nor the firefighting season, and the burnt areas have reached record number. According to the European Forestry Information System, by August 18, almost nine million acres had been burned in the Old Epirus. Multiple of those burned on average in the last twenty summers.

This year the sad lead is the Spain with nearly 4 million burnt acres, close and the Portugal with 2.5 million acres.

What is happening this year on the Iberian Peninsula has not happened again.

To Greeceagain, we are not experiencing the most difficult year. This year’s fires were many and particularly devastating in Chios and Achaiawith nearly half a million acres of forests having become ash so far.

Fortunately, however, the disaster did not reach the 2007 or 2023 levels, when they had burned 2.7 and 1.7 million acres respectively. Hopefully, by the end of the firefighting season we can still say this “fortunately”.

Foolish festivities, no results in

Of course, for those who saw their island, their field, their home burning, statistics are little importance. It is a little importance of the abroad and time celebrations of the authorities that “we are ready to face fires” or political conflicts about who is to blame that we are not so ready.

What matters is that we did not over half a million acres of forest. Especially when this year’s burned come to be added to last year’s and pre -war, without nature from healing its wounds and the state doing its job. What matters is that we do not have the luxury of seeing a single acre of suburban forest burning around our cities, mainly around Athens or Thessaloniki, which have become unmistakable, especially in the summers.

The lost bet of prevention

We have known for years that the only way to protect ourselves from fires is to invest in prevention. We also know that climate change brings more and more intensity fires than those with which we are facing earlier.

We know it in Greece, we also know it in Europe. But our leaders do not seem to be burning to deal with the problem. Tackling the climate crisis is no longer a priority of even the European Union – and not only because Trump and Coa do not believe it exists.

The equipment and the money

The new priority is military equipment, the satisfaction of the irrational goal of spending 5% of their GDP of cannons. Trump wants it, by NATO Secretary General and the equipment industry and most of Europe accept it. Putin helped very much in this with his invasion of Ukraine.

Suddenly, everyone remembered the Latin who learned at school and argue that “whoever wants peace is preparing for war”. So the EU It will spend 800 billion euros on new weapons to become so strong that it can avoid using them.

And because as we have learned to be told “there are no money”, investments in the green transition are second. Obviously, European leaders believe that tackling climate crisis can wait. The harsh reality of this summer, the deadly heatwave and the devastating fires were not capable of persuading them.