Forest chief sets sights on Mt Penteli’s rebirth
Environment Ministry’s general director of forestry outlines plan to revive burnt expanses, cultivate residents’ relationship with nature
Back when the Environment Ministry’s general director of forests was a boy, his family would leave Athens every summer to spend a month and a half exploring the enchanted forests of Mount Pindos. There, in the land of his forebears, on the border between the regions of Trikala and Ioannina in northwestern Greece, at an altitude of 1,000 to 1,300 meters, in a landscape tickly blanketed by firs, oaks and giant beeches, the seeds of a forester were planted in the heart, if not the mind just yet, of Vangelis Gountoufas.
The sudden death of his father during his university entrance exams caused him to miss the test in mathematics, as a result of which he ended up at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s School of Forestry and Natural Environment in 1983, where the seed went on to grow. Just a few days into the course, the 18-year-old freshman knew that he was exactly where he was supposed to be. What he did not know was that those years at university, from 1983 to 1989, would establish the foundation of a long and, at times, painful career in the civil service that would take him, three decades later, to the top of his profession.
But what does the general director of the Environment Ministry’s Secretariat for Forests do exactly? “In short, the General Directorate of Forests has an executive role in planning forest policy, but also in overseeing its implementation,” Gountoufas, who was appointed to the post in 2020, tells Kathimerini. He underscores the importance of the second part of his answer, noting that until recently, and even when there was such a thing as a policy for the protection and management of forests, there was no one to make sure it was being applied.
“The Forestry Service, the entire sector and, even more generally, the natural environment in general, had been completely undervalued since the early 1980s – and that is the bitter truth,” he says frankly.
“Funds were constantly being reduced, no new personnel were being hired, there was no tangible interest from any of a succession of governments,” says Gountoufas, who started his career in the civil service in 1992 as an employee at the Forestry Service of the Cycladic Islands. “The tip of the iceberg was the decision to transfer the Forestry Services to the regional authorities and later to decentralize the administration and transfer the responsibility for putting our forest fires to the Fire Service: Both were tragic mistakes,” he adds, not wanting to elaborate on the past much more, except to say that the last time foresters were hired by the Greek state was in 2002. “We’re getting a new batch now, in 2024!”
What Gountoufas regrets even more than those decades of undermining the state’s forest management sector, is the fact that forests themselves were undermined – and this is something we are paying for dearly today, judging by the fact that even though it is October, we are still dealing with very serious wildfires, as was the case recently in Corinth.
Is there any point in rekindling the debate about whether the Forestry Service or the Fire Service ought to be responsible for managing wildfires?
You can’t fix one big mistake by making another. Right now, the Forestry service is frail, and is trying to get back on its feet. Taking the task of battling forest fires away from the Fire Service and handing it over to the Forestry Service would be as grave a mistake as that of 1998. My belief is that everyone is essential in the extremely difficult challenge of forest fires.
So, we’re talking about a non-dilemma that only serves to deflect attention away from the elephant in the room.
Exactly. And that is none other than prevention. The steps that have been taken in this area, too, in recent years are truly important. We are in our third year of the “Anti-Nero” program, an annual prevention-driven forest clearing scheme, we have valuable resources from the Recovery and Resilience Fund, the Green Fund and the National Development Program [public investments], we have a close and effective relationship with the Ministry of Climate Change and Civil Protection, we have taken action in all the difficult and most dangerous forest ecosystems with intensive cleanups, servicing thousands of kilometers of forest service roads and invested a lot in cooperation with the Fire Service, which carries out systematic patrols on foot and by air with aircraft that are always carrying a load of water and can extinguish a blaze as soon as it starts.
Is this what the government has touted as a change in the firefighting “dogma,” which helped prevent dozens of blazes this year?
Even though the subject comes under the Fire Service’s purview, I will say the following, within the framework of our cooperation: Up until last year, terrestrial units were dispatched as soon as a blaze was located in order to assess its size and trajectory, with the decision on whether to also dispatch water-dumping aircraft coming on the basis of that assessment. A lot of precious time was lost in this way. Now, they don’t wait for the Fire Service trucks to get to the site of a blaze, but bombard it immediately with water, mainly from helicopters. Every incident – with critical areas like Attica having priority – is now treated like a major incident from the get-go.
This summer’s wildfire in Varnavas in East Attica swept through vulnerable ecosystems that had been recovering gradually from a previous major blaze, in 2009. What’s going to happen to those areas now?
Even though only 10% of the Varnavas fire destroyed tall forest trees, we are talking about a major environmental disaster because the blaze went through areas that were in the process of regrowing. We are on tenterhooks to see whether natural regeneration will kick in or not precisely because these areas are on the brink. But we’re not going to wait; we will definitely step in with artificial regeneration. The timing is good, as the National Reforestation Plan has already gotten off the ground and we have already inducted this area into it with 1,850 hectares (170 of which are in the burnt expanse). But that’s not all. We are going to identify the areas that have been burned multiple times, revise the plan and utilize other funding sources, sponsors and resources from the national development program and the Green Fund. We must intervene, and in this effort, we aim to establish mixed forests of conifers and broad-leaf trees – especially in peri-urban areas – which are more resilient to natural disasters.
Our generation was bequeathed Penteli as a mature and verdant forest; the younger generation is getting a scraggly and ecologically sapped mountain. Is Penteli a lost cause?
Not at all. Penteli can become what it was once more, and even better. I am of the opinion that we need to get the people into the forest. Anything you keep in a sterilized glass jar will eventually die. Two things happen when you make people a party of what you want to accomplish: You cultivate the awareness and behavior for protecting the forest, you turn them into a guardian of the natural environment they enjoy and you make them consciously complicit in preventing fires. You need to educate and train people, not ban activities inside the forest – though I am, of course, referring to activities with a low environmental impact, such as walking, climbing or cycling, anything that cultivates a mental and emotional connection to the forest. This is especially so for forests on the outskirts of cities like Athens and Thessaloniki. The more you sanitize a forest, the more dangerous and vulnerable you make it. Therefore, it is our absolute intention to make Penteli a proper forest again; we owe it to our children and to the generations that will come after them.
Incentives for cooperatives
Legislation passed in the spring aimed at reforming forest management seeks to put all of the country’s forest ecosystems under management. “In postwar Greece, forests, and especially those in Thessaly and further south, were abandoned to their fate because of massive internal migration,” says Gountoufas.
“What we are doing now is providing incentives so that all of the country’s forests will be placed under some form of management. Given how difficult it was for the existing forestry cooperatives to cover this need, the decision was taken, at the political level, to include private companies in the incentive scheme. In complete and equal cooperation with the forestry cooperatives, they will undertake the task of managing ecosystems in central and southern Greece, including Attica,” he adds.
Forest cooperatives are organizations formed by stakeholders to manage, protect and sustainably use forest resources.
Gountoufas says that there has been a marked increase in interest from young people seeking to get certified as forest workers so that new cooperatives, such as the one for Parnitha, can be established.
“The mixed vehicles will carry out a 10-year management plan for every forest, starting with clearing away all dangerous biomass,” he explains.
