Can Greece Solve Its Wildfire Problem?

Greece is facing a wildfire crisis that parallels many other countries in fire-prone regions around the globe. Recent wildfire data for Greece point to an alarming trend of increasing fire size and severity catalyzed by climate change, lack of forest and fuel management, urban expansion into wildlands around major population centers, and rural exodus from areas that traditionally supported fire-resilient land uses. Fire management in Greece has long emphasized suppression with relatively little attention to prevention and coordination. In this paper, we identify key factors that are slowing progress towards a solution to the Greek wildfire crisis, including the current legislative framework around wildfire management that has contributed to conflicts and inefficiency. We then discuss specific policies to rebalance the current suppression emphasis by integrating new prevention strategies aiming to create fire-resilient landscapes and reduce wildfire impacts, widely adopt the use of technology, and enhance stakeholder cooperation for more efficient fire suppression. We also highlight how optimizing landscape scale management of fuels is contributing solutions to the wildfire crisis, specifically from the EU-funded FIRE-RES project.