Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the creation of a new special fund for the weaning of the Greek islands from fossil fuels and the development of renewable energy sources to cover their needs, during the international conference “Our Ocean Conference”, which this year is hosted in Athena.

The resources, as the prime minister mentioned, will come from the rights of the European Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System and, depending on the fluctuating price of the auctioned rights, it is estimated that they could amount to 2 billion euros.

According to Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the money will be allocated primarily to projects for “connecting our islands to the mainland grid, energy storage, for renewable energy sources, including offshore wind energy” and for “construction of multi-purpose water reservoirs”.

Government sources with knowledge of the matter said the agreement to finance the new carbon fund through the European Emissions Trading System was recently reached after government negotiations with the European Commission and the European Investment Bank.

The same officials even noted that the amount of 2 billion euros mentioned by Kyriakos Mitsotakis constitutes a conservative estimate of the money that our country will have at its disposal, as it does not take into account the forecasts for a possible increase in the price of rights in the next two years, which would bring more money to Greece, not counting the additional investments that will be mobilized.

The implementation horizon of the projects that will be selected, according to the same sources, is 2032, while in the ranks of the government there is a feeling that the new financial instrument will strengthen the GR-Eco islands initiative, so that it can expand with steady steps beyond successful pilot projects in Halki and Astypalaia. It is recalled that the third island that has joined this initiative for green islands is Poros.

Two new national marine parks, end to trawler fishing

As part of this year’s 9th “Our Ocean Conference”, the host Greece made 21 commitments amounting to 780 million euros for the protection and sustainable use of the oceans and seas, with the Prime Minister standing by four of them.

The first foresees the creation of two more large marine national parks, one in the Aegean and one in the Ionian, with an emphasis on the protection of marine mammals, wild birds and sea turtles. As Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, in this way Greece increases the area of ​​marine protected areas by 80%, “covering about 1/3 of our territorial marine waters”.

“We will create a state-of-the-art surveillance system, with drones, satellites and artificial intelligence, to effectively patrol these areas by 2026,” added the prime minister.

Greece also committed to a ban on trawling, which is considered particularly harmful to marine ecosystems. The ban will take effect in national marine parks by 2026 and in all marine protected areas by 2030.

Our country also pledged to reduce plastic waste in the sea by 50% and microplastics by 30% by 2030, compared to 2019.