Bushes, cooling centres, water stations. All three are on Haris Doukas’s thoughts as he sits in his office-turned-control centre on the highest flooring of metropolis corridor.
Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s high precedence is straightforward: making certain that the folks of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer time. After a June that was the most well liked on document, the town has already witnessed record-breaking temperatures and wildfires.
“In anywhere tackling such excessive climate phenomena could be troublesome,” says Doukas. “In a metropolis of seven hills and such dense city improvement it’s particularly complicated.”
Which is why Doukas is so preoccupied with the planting of timber.
“A inexperienced neighbourhood can expertise a drop in temperatures of 5%, the distinction between a tortuous day in a warmth wave or not,” says the mayor, who was a political unknown instructing vitality coverage at Athens’ Polytechnic earlier than being fielded for the put up by the social democrat Pasok get together.
“It’s not a matter of way of life, or enhancing the standard of life; it’s about survival when 23% of the inexperienced lung round Athens has in recent times been destroyed by fires. It’s very important we have now extra timber, extra air-conditioned neighborhood centres and extra water stations on our streets and squares.”
Doukas isn’t any newcomer to the local weather disaster or the perils it poses.
“The perfect factor about this job is you can enhance peoples’ lives,” says the 44-year-old. “It’s not about theories however about making Athens extra sustainable and resilient.”
However he has no illusions. “In fact I’m nervous … We’re doing no matter we are able to.”
Final week Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose centre-right authorities has invested closely in a “struggle chest” of fire-fighting gear, together with early detection drones, warned this summer time was “anticipated to be significantly harmful”. After days of fireside fighters battling blazes fuelled by hotter, drier and windier climate – the inform story indicators of local weather change – it was, he mentioned, clear that “probably the most troublesome occasions” lay forward.
With temperatures nudging 40C in mid-June, and meteorologists predicting the mercury can be “six levels celsius above regular” for the remainder of July, Athens’ metropolis corridor has opened air-conditioned public areas, arrange a 24-hour “heatwave line,” strengthened employees at municipal clinics and prolonged a house care help programme that sees social staff, nurses and psychologists dispatched to the residences of aged folks dwelling alone. Underneath a pilot scheme monitoring the consequences of warmth on the older era, seniors have been given biometric watches that, if wanted, can alert authorities.
“Greece has an ageing inhabitants that’s, and can be, extra susceptible to the warmth,” says Olga Dourou, the vice mayor in command of the programme whose research of energetic ageing at PhD stage can also be being put into follow by the municipality. “Folks at the moment are dwelling longer and we’re going to need to take measures to cope with it.”
Such steps are a world away from the youth of Efi Petropoulou and Rena Papadaki, retirees for whom reminiscences of Attica’s as soon as famously dry local weather are nonetheless vivid. “The environment in Athens has actually modified,” says Petropoulou. “It’s so heavy and humid and it’s undoubtedly acquired so much hotter. Earlier than you’d cope by closing the shutters and placing on the fan. Now it’s unattainable with out air-conditioning.”
“And who’d have thought we’d come to this?” her buddy, Papadaki, chips in, pointing to the air-con unit on the neighbourhood “friendship membership” the place the 2 septuagenarians convene every day.
The membership is considered one of seven neighborhood centres in central Athens that the municipality has opened to guard and shelter folks when warmth waves strike.
“Most get right here by 9am when the doorways open and depart at 9pm after they shut once more,” says Aliki Kirmitsa who lives in Neos Kosmos, a blue-collar space of post-war condominium blocks the place the centre is positioned. “It’s a blessing. Folks like us within the third age would wrestle with out it. In spite of everything, who can afford to maintain the air-con working across the clock?”
Greeks who would possibly by no means have talked in regards to the climate – or at the least have confronted it with a nonchalance bordering on stoicism – at this time comply with it in actual time on cellular phone apps usually shaking their heads in disbelief.
Not too long ago Dimitris Dimitras, a waiter in Plaka, the picturesque district beneath Acropolis, is amongst these cursing on the humidity that was making it particularly exhausting to work.
“Have a look at this, these humidity ranges, we could possibly be in Indonesia,” he says, pulling out his telephone. “I’m 61 and the warmth actually bothers me now … if it goes on like this there’ll be no one ready tables.”
Ever extra Greeks are selecting to vacation in northern climes, with Norway and different components of Scandinavia turning into more and more widespread. “All our flights are absolutely booked,” says Frosso Stavraki on the Cosmorama journey company, which specialises in excursions to northern Europe. “When it’s so scorching persons are searching for someplace cool, authentically cool.”
Again in his workplace at metropolis corridor, Doukas says his intention is to plant 5,000 timber by the top of the 12 months – 25,000 by the top of his time period – to assist cut back air pollution, decrease temperatures and enhance the standard of air.
It’s a tall order however he’s decided. “I comply with our new tree app on my telephone daily,” he says, pulling it up on his cellular display screen.
“At 11%, the inexperienced area in Athens is nicely behind the European common … with this I can see precisely the place and when new samplings have been planted. Right here it’s the way in which ahead.”
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