Editorial: Defences

Climate change, and its repercussions, is an urgent issue of grave concern.

This is not a neutral concept or cause for analysis without a way out. It is the current global and local condition that affects our lives.

Heat waves, wildfires, natural disasters and everything expected to occur in autumn and winter, such as flooding, are the unpleasant result of major shifts that have occurred over the last two decades – high temperatures, the melting of ice, the rise of the sea level – for which humans are responsible.

We experienced this in our country with scattered wildfires, as in Methana, with insufferably high temperatures in urban centres, but also globally with the images of huge fires in Canada and Cyprus, and we are still at the beginning of summer.

The Civil Protection Bureau should be viewed not just as yet another link in the management of the state, but as a basic starting point for shaping Greece’s defence with the added parameter that those in power will take climate change into account as a factor in all of our daily lives.

Governments will be judged on the basis of their flexibility, a contemporary plan, and bringing to bear a new line for citizens, guided by the fact that the repercussions of the new climate are not just the stuff of a school essay, but rather a normalcy that one has a duty to stem and which can transform daily life within a matter of minutes.