Wildfire burns over 10,000 hectares in western Athens: EU’s climate agency

A major wildfire that broke out on July 31 near the communities of Psatha and Porto Germeno, west of Athens, has burned more than 10,000 hectares in western Attica, EU’s climate agency Copernicus said on Monday.

The blaze prompted a large-scale emergency response involving hundreds of firefighters, fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, as crews continued efforts to contain the fire.

Authorities ordered evacuations in several communities, while the fire service said more than 100 homes were destroyed or damaged.

An image captured by a Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on Aug. 2 showed the extensive burn scar along the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth.

The burn area is visible in reddish-brown, while a dense smoke plume stretches more than 70 kilometers (43.4 miles) southeast across the Saronic Gulf.

Separately, the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned that Southern Europe is entering what it described as a “permanent wildfire crisis,” calling on the EU to strengthen climate and environmental policies.

“As catastrophic wildfires sweep across Southern Europe, WWF warns that the EU is sleepwalking into a permanent wildfire crisis while simultaneously weakening key environmental protections that help safeguard people, economies and nature from climate impacts,” the group said in a statement.

According to WWF, more than 460,000 hectares have already burned across the EU so far this year, well above historical averages.

The group cited recent scientific studies indicating that climate change made the extreme fire weather behind recent wildfires at least twice as likely in France and at least 20 times more likely in Spain.

“Europe is burning,” Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, forests manager at WWF’s European Policy Office, said in a statement, arguing that policymakers should reinforce climate and nature legislation to help prevent future disasters instead of weakening environmental protections.