Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis expressed his ambition to make Greece “the best tourist destination in the world in a 10-year period” during a discussion with Luis Araujo, president of the European Travel Commission, during the forum “EU Tourism: Resilience in the Era of the Climate Crisis”, held on the recently fire-stricken island of Rhodes.
The Greek premier spoke about the tourist season extension and stressed the need for better wages in the tourism industry, focused on the challenges of climate change and the measures taken by the government, while underlining the importance of the upcoming European elections.
“Rhodes was hit hard, but managed to recover quickly”
Mitsotakis referred to the devastating wildfire that had swept across Rhodes the previous summer. He said that the island had managed to recover “incredibly quickly.”
This reflected both the response of the central government and of regional and local authorities, as well as the way that the tourism industry and local community of Rhodes had come together to support visitors during those difficult moments.
“Essentially, they used this crisis as an opportunity, more or less, to change the image of Rhodes to that of a resilient island. I consider that this is a very, very important issue,” Mitsotakis said.
More than 2 billion euros invested in civil protection
He also outlined the government’s measures in response to the climate crisis, noting that “the Mediterranean as a whole is a hotspot for climate change,” which would bring a greater number of fires, floods and extreme phenomena.
“We know, of course, that these natural disasters will occur with ever greater frequency, which means that we must reinforce the civil protection mechanism as a whole. As a country, we are investing more than two billion euros on civil protection,” he said, while stressing that the top priority was protecting human lives.
He explained that this translates into ensuring the safe evacuation of people, as had been done on Rhodes the previous summer, when 25,000 visitors had been removed to safety under complex conditions.
The prime minister stressed that “as a country, we invest more than 2 billion euros in civil protection.”
Turning Greece into a “workshop” for best practices
Mitsotakis underlined the efforts to introduce innovative cyclical economy solutions in Greece and turn the country into a “workshop” for best practices.
He pointed out that these were not always related to lowering carbon emissions but also, in relation to the resilience of the tourism industry, to protecting the environment and biodiversity.
“Next week we are hosting a major international conference in Greece, the ‘Our Ocean Conference’, where we expected the private sector to make specific commitments and specific promises on how we can protect our marine biodiversity,” he said.
