The ferocious flames that tore through southern Europe this summer should have come as no surprise. Scientists have long warned that a warming climate would make wildfires more frequent, intense and harder to control.
A September 2025 report by World Weather Attribution noted that extreme fire-favouring conditions are around 40 times more likely and about 30% more intense today than they would have been without climate change, shifting from a once-in-500-years rarity to something expected roughly once every 15 years.
While climate change is the larger part of the story, a second, equally human-made problem is compounding the crisis: how societies are choosing to respond to these changing conditions. Nowhere is that clearer than in Greece where two decades of policy choices have shifted focus, and funding, away from prevention and forest management and restoration, and into costly last-minute firefighting.
The result is a system geared to react rather than prepare, allowing fires to grow larger, burn hotter and forests to recover slower — all while each season grows more dangerous.
Mati’s scars, and a wildfire policy failure laid bare
Seven years after flames tore through Mati — a coastal town east of Athens where 102 people died and over 1,400 hectares, including pines and olive trees, where torched — the blackened landscape bears the marks of misguided policy.
One of the government’s flagship remembrance projects, the "Mati Memorial Park," is a patch of parched earth dotted with withering saplings. Once a lush forest, the reforested trees now look frail and ready to snap at any moment.
Some nonprofits have tried to fill the gap. We4All, an organisation founded in response to the 2018 fire, proposed a reforestation plan to several local authorities and eventually partnered with the Penteli Forest Service, which covers Mati, and environmental departments in the municipalities of Nea Makri and Rafina.
"The plant species were selected by specialists, taking into account their morphology and suitability for the area," said Thodoris Kolovos, a representative of the Penteli Forest Service. The mix, he added, included small pines, cypresses, junipers, and dwarf pomegranate trees.
On paper, the efforts were impressive. "We planted more than 25,000 trees in the area," said John Iliopoulos, one of the co-founders. According to him, the plantings occurred mostly in 2019, with replanting in 2020 where trees had died.
But a walk through the reforested sites, now under municipal oversight, reveals mostly stunted shrubs and scattered junipers, a sobering testament to how little has truly recovered. For an organisation citing so many planted trees, the evidence on the ground remains surprisingly sparse.
Nevertheless, the contrast between treated and untreated areas highlights both the value of intervention and the scale of what remains undone. Where restoration occurred, some life has returned. Elsewhere, only charred remnants remain.
The great transfer: from fire prevention to reaction
The seeds of today's crisis were planted in 1998, when Greece transferred responsibility for wildfire suppression and response from forestry to fire services. This institutional reshuffling was not merely administrative — it included the transfer of crucial equipment, including the Forest Service's entire vehicle fleet.
"We used to have a very efficient forest guard service," says Gavriil Xanthopoulos, the research director at the Hellenic Agricultural Organisation Demeter, the agricultural research body of the Hellenic Ministry for Rural Development and Food. "But that system has been going downhill for 25 years."
The decision was politically driven, prompted by criticism of the Forest Service’s performance in previous years. It lacked, however, scientific input and strategic planning, drawing opposition from experts, academics, and politicians.
Since then, forest guard numbers have dwindled, while firefighting forces have swelled. Government documents expose the scale of institutional collapse. A July 2024 letter from then Environment Minister Theodoros Skylakakis to the Interior Ministry contains a startling admission: Greece had not made a major forest service hire in 23 years.
At the time of the letter, the entire country's forest management consisted of just 500 forest scientists with university degrees, responsible for strategic planning and supervision of forest operations, alongside 375 forest technicians who handled critical field work related to logging, planting, fire prevention, and on-site forestry project supervision.
Forest guards are also responsible for reforestation. Their expertise is essential in selecting appropriate, fire-resistant tree species based on local soil conditions, overseeing planting operations, and ensuring young seedlings survive through proper placement, protection, and care.
Put in perspective, at the local level, the numbers become even more alarming. Most forestry offices have only four scientists and three forest technicians — skeleton crews attempting to manage vast territories with minimal resources. Some Forest Services operate with no scientists at all, or at most a single specialist.
Each forest scientist is, in theory, responsible for about 385,000 square meters of land - roughly 54 football fields. Under those conditions, meaningful oversight is virtually impossible, especially in remote or difficult-to-access terrain. And it also stalls innovation. "It is difficult to integrate new technologies when you have a forest service office with one or two people," said Xanthopoulos.
The Ministry of the Environment and Energy has warned that this critical situation will only worsen, as "a very large percentage of the currently serving personnel in these specialties is expected to retire" in the near future — creating a knowledge and experience gap that cannot be quickly filled.
In what appears to be a recognition of the crisis, the Ministry of Interior authorised an additional 150 specialist positions in August 2024. However, this represents less than a 20% increase to an already severely depleted workforce, far short of what's needed to reverse decades of institutional neglect.
A nation of firefighters, but few forest stewards
According to Eurostat, Greece employed about 16,000 firefighters in 2023 (0.39% of its total workforce), including professional, contract, seasonal, and volunteer firefighters. This summer, the number rose to a record 18,000. Forest guards are outnumbered 20-to-1.
In contrast to the slow process of hiring forest service personnel, after a devastating 2021 wildfire season, the Greek government pledged to hire 500 new firefighters dedicated to forest fire suppression — a promise fulfilled by June 2025. No similar expansion was made for prevention or restoration staff.
Comparing annual budgets also shows the disparity. In 2017, forest service funding was just one-fifth of the firefighting budget. And while millions have gone into suppression – from a €2.3-million investment in aerial drones for early fire detection to €361 million (mostly EU-funded) for seven Canadian firefighting aircaft in 2024 — the underlying problem persists.
“There's massive investment in fire suppression — huge helicopter and drone contracts — but the fires keep coming,” said Xanthopoulos. “Across the EU, we’re pouring money into reaction instead of refining prevention, which would cost far less.”
When contractors replace forest experts
Greece has recently signalled a desire to rebalance prevention and response, with EU funding helping new reforestation efforts.
In 2020, the Ministry of the Environment and Energy unveiled a National Reforestation Plan, supported by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Funds (RRF), which targets degraded forest ecosystems in regions like Attica and North Evia. Around €52 million were approved for reforestation using indigenous species, with forest services providing oversight.
But here, too, questions arise. Beginning in 2024, several forest departments, including the Penteli Forest Department which covers the mountainous area around Mati, have been outsourcing reforestation through multi-million-euro contracts, sometimes to companies with little or no forestry expertise.
The Penteli €14-million contract went to T&T Construction and Mesogeios. According to their websites, Mesogeios focuses on water treatment, waste management, and renewable energy projects, while T&T Construction handles traditional building work — hardly the credentials for reforestation specialists.
Despite this, the same companies will handle reforestation across several other Attica forest departments, raising overall concerns about contractor vetting and oversight processes.
Neither the Ministry of the Environment and Energy nor the two contracted companies responded to requests for comment.
The feedback loop of fire
In August 2025, wildfires scorched over 10,000 hectares in just two days, from 4,000 on Chios Island to 2,000 in western Greece’s Moiraiika.
Each blaze makes the next more likely. Mount Penteli, above Mati, has burned repeatedly since 2018: over 2,700 hectares lost in 2022 alone, with more again in 2024. The landscape barely recovers before flames return.
For communities like Mati, survival depends not on pledges or monuments, but on ecosystems strong enough to withstand what is coming.
As another fire season ends, one question looms: will Greece finally balance prevention, restoration and suppression, or continue counting hectares lost?
This investigation was developed with the support of JournalismFund.
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