The summer of 2023 has seen Europe battered by heatwaves, record-breaking wildfires, and catastrophic floods, often occurring simultaneously. Parts of Greece, Italy and Spain saw record-breaking temperatures above 45°C.
The wildfire in Alexandroupolis in Greece was the largest wildfire in Europe since records started in 2000, burning an area of more than 90 000 hectares and killing at least 20 people. At the same time, other parts of Europe experienced significantly more rainfall than average, resulting in UCPM activations for floods in Slovenia and Italy, while exceptionally large floods were also recorded in Greece, Austria, and northern European countries such as Sweden and Norway. Ireland potentially experienced its wettest July on record.
For the UCPM, the extreme weather meant responding to extraordinary situations. For the first time, on 6 August, the UCPM was activated within the same day for both flood and wildfire disasters, when flooding affected two thirds of Slovenia and wildfires raged in Cyprus. From May to August, the Commission's Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC) facilitated around the clock large-scale operations to respond to floods in Italy and Slovenia as well as wildfires in Cyprus, Tunisia, Italy, Canada, and twice in Greece.
Much of the EU’s response to this wildfire season was possible thanks to anticipatory work done in the ERCC: the UCPM had prepared by doubling its rescEU fleet and pre-positioning ground fire-fighting teams in Greece, France, and Portugal. Additionally, a dedicated wildfire monitoring team was created in the ERCC with the support of Member States’ experts and scientists to exploit the entire range of available early warning systems. As a result, for the two activations by from Greece, more than 1 000 firefighters were mobilised, along with 21 planes from the rescEU reserves and the European Civil Protection Pool, which carried out over 900 water drops in total. Both times European teams were deployed in less than 24 hours. In the largest rescEU deployment to date, 12 UCPM member and participating states were involved in these operations.
In parallel to the response to these disasters, the ERCC also coordinated the repatriation of EU citizens from Niger, the evacuation of burn victims after the industrial accident in Romania, and the response to the wildfires in Canada. All of these operations came on top of the ongoing coordination of assistance to Ukraine in the largest and most complex UCPM activation so far.
The performance of the UCPM this summer stands as proof of the diversity of types of response the Union can provide and the ERCC’s ability to coordinate and manage several very different crises simultaneously, while operating at full capacity.
“As disasters break records year after year in a context of heightened insecurity across the globe, we must ensure that the ERCC, as the Commission’s cross-sectoral crisis hub, is equipped to fulfil its role with all the tools and resources necessary for joint situational awareness, early warning, anticipation, information exchange and operational coordination”
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