A message projected by Greenpeace activists calling for stronger commitments to a conference center near Athens, Greece. file. | Image Credit: AFP
Greece aims to create two large marine parks as part of a 780-million-euro program to protect biodiversity and marine ecosystems, with plans to be announced at an international oceans conference starting in Athens on Tuesday.
But the plan has angered Greece’s neighbor and regional rival, Turkey, while environmental groups say the initiative does not go far enough, allowing the country to practice environmentally damaging practices such as energy exploration in sensitive marine environments.
With thousands of islands and islets and one of the Mediterranean’s longest coastlines, Greece has said it will create one new marine park in the Ionian Sea and one in the Aegean Sea, bringing the total marine protected areas in its waters to more than 30%.
When the plan was aired last week, Turkey’s foreign ministry accused Athens of using environmental issues to push its geopolitical agenda. The two NATO members have been at odds for decades over various issues, including territorial claims in the Aegean, and have come to the brink of war three times in the past 50 years.
Relations have improved somewhat over the past year after a tense period in which the countries’ warships clashed in the eastern Mediterranean. But Ankara reacted with irritation to Greece’s plan for a marine park in Agen.
“It is known that Greece has been trying to benefit from every platform in the context of Aegean issues for a long time,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.
“Despite the recent softening in our relations, Greece seems to be exploiting environmental issues this time.”
Greece’s foreign ministry responded that Ankara was “politicizing an obvious environmental issue”.
“We are increasing the size of our marine protected areas by 80%, banning harmful fishing practices and using new technologies to monitor and enforce the commitments we make here,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said before the conference.
Mr Mitsotakis said the two-day meeting in Athens “planned to accelerate global action against two overlapping crises: the climate crisis and our ocean crisis”.
But environmental organizations have called for stronger commitments.
Under the slogan “The ocean is not for sale”, Greenpeace urged leaders attending the Our Ocean Conference to take concrete steps to protect the marine environment.
The conference “should not be an opportunity for governments to congratulate themselves on what they have said so far,” said Nicos Charalambidis, head of Greenpeace Greece.
Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and other organizations have drawn particular criticism for allowing deep-sea seismic exploration for energy and mineral resources in Greece, which covers waters more than 5,200 meters deep in the Mediterranean.
The trench, which stretches from southwest Greece to Crete, is an important habitat for the Mediterranean’s few hundred sperm whales and other marine mammals already threatened by fishing, ship collisions and plastic pollution.
Asked whether the Greek government plans to extend the protection of the entire Hellenic trench, Greece’s Environment and Energy Minister Theodoros Skylakis stressed that adapting to a green economy would require significant funding in the coming decades.