Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met with the European Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness, and Crisis Management Hadja Lahbib, at Maximos Mansion.
At the beginning of the meeting, the Prime Minister and the Commissioner had the following dialogue:
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Thank you again, Commissioner, it’s a real pleasure to have you in Athens. Thank you very much for sharing the stage a few minutes ago in, I think, a ceremony which indicates the importance of Europe supporting Greece in terms of upgrading our readiness when it comes to civil protection. This has been a very important priority for the government and for me personally.
The country has been traumatised in the past by natural disasters which resulted in the completely unnecessary loss of human life. Since 2019, the strengthening of our civil protection and our preparedness mechanism has been a top priority for our government. We now have, as you know, a competent Ministry and a Minister in charge of this portfolio. But as a country, which is very much affected by the climate crisis, we feel that this is a necessary investment.
Of course, I commend also your initiatives and the fact that we are part of a European family, not just in terms of money, that is important, but also in terms of thinking along the same lines, understanding that we need to pool and share resources. I very much appreciate the fact that every summer we have prepositioned firefighters from European countries in Greece ready to help. It is our hope that they will only be here for holidays, but if necessary, they will help us. We mobilised some of our friends from Moldova a few days ago in a fire we had in northern Greece, and it’s always a great example of European solidarity.
Of course, I think it’s also important, and I’ve raised this numerous times at the European Council and with the President of the Commission, that in terms of our overall response to the climate crisis, we need to start focusing more on adaptation. I wouldn’t say less on mitigation because mitigation is critical, but we need to focus more on adaptation because the climate crisis is here. It’s a reality. Temperatures are going to increase. We will have more wildfires. We will have more extreme weather events. It’s a reality that we need not just to prepare for, but we need to be ready to handle it in the best possible way.
One last point I want to raise, which is very important to us, it relates to the use of technology. In our case, our drone surveillance system has been absolutely critical in terms of identifying wildfires very early, which makes early intervention easier and faster, and that makes all the difference in the world, but also in terms of how we use technology, artificial intelligence, in terms of predicting weather patterns.
This is critical: predicting the behaviour of wildfires. Using satellite and data inventory, Copernicus system is a product and service we should be very proud of as Europeans. So technology, especially when it comes to micro forecasting of weather events, this could be a European platform, and it should be a European project, because especially in instances such as floods, it can make all the difference in the world. So thank you again.
Hadja Lahbib: Thank you Prime Minister for your warm welcome. And indeed, I just arrived yesterday in Greece, and I’m very impressed of what I’ve seen. I visited your centre of emergency. I met even members that were posted in Brussels in all ERCC, all centres of emergencies. And so, as you mentioned, very rightly, we are all in the same world. We live in the same planet. We are confronted with the same threats, and this landscape of risk is only dramatically evaluating. We need to address it. We need to be prepared for that and that’s why we launched this preparedness strategy on the 26th of March.
Two days ago, we adopted a very ambitious budget. We got much because we need to tackle, we need to develop, as you rightly said, technologies. We need to invest on research and development. It’s important to be prepared to avoid maybe the next pandemic. All the scientists say that it will happen. We don’t know just when. It’s important to avoid the scenarios that we have been confronted during the COVID 19 and to have strong medical countermeasures strategies, because it’s not only about wildfires, unfortunately, it’s also about hybrid threats and so on.
I went to Sweden where they perceive very clearly that the major threat is not wildfires, it’s about hybrid attacks and cyber attacks, and maybe also weaponization of migration and so on. We have to have a comprehensive strategy. That’s exactly what we are doing with this new preparedness strategy. I hope I will get your support because indeed, we voted on a very ambitious budget with 10.7 billion dedicated to the all scope, I mean, the comprehensive strategy for preparedness. It’s important then to have the support of the Council.
We are going to talk about that, how we can adapt also our civil protection rules to respond better to complex crises with the cascading effect, because we know that when it started, for instance, with wildfires, then it can also develop other threats like sanitation, floods sometimes as well. I’ve heard, we discovered yesterday that sometimes we had at the same time in different parts of the country’s floods and dramatic wildfires.
In this MFF -it’s important to discuss about it, because it was just released two days ago-, we increased also, the purpose was to increase our flexibility because we need also more resources and to be more agile following the different scenarios and risks we are going to face. It’s better to be prepared before, than recover after. It is a smart investment.
Also, we are going to speak a little bit about humanitarian aid because I’m also Commissioner for Crisis Management in this sense. Here we are also facing a growing funding gap. It’s important to address this because it addresses the root causes of migration as well.
You know that the situation is dramatic in Sudan, but also, for instance, in Gaza. We just reached an agreement that we presented under the Council of Foreign Affairs. I briefed the ministers on the state of play of the agreement with Israel on humanitarian access. This agreement is a step in the right direction, but it is far from being implemented and it must be put into action now. We will continue to monitor and provide an update on compliance every two weeks, and the member states will also have to decide what the next steps are.
Finally, on equality, it’s important also to develop gender equality. We have also increased the budget there with a new fund, which is called Agora Fund, to increase our competitiveness, because at a certain point, gender equality is also a question of competitiveness to take all the skills we have in our society and essentially half of our humanity on board. Thank you very much.
