Copernicus EMS Burn-Severity Mapping Feeds Greece's 80,000-Hectare antiNERO Wildfire Restoration Programme

The Rhodes wildfire of 18 July 2023 burned across the island for ten days. The EU's Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) Rapid Mapping module was activated eight times in the following ten days, covering Attica, the eastern Peloponnese and Rhodes.

A peer-reviewed analysis combining Copernicus Land Monitoring Service data with Sentinel-2 imagery (published in the MDPI journal Fire, 2024) classified the burned area by severity, alongside pre-fire tree-density and land-cover baselines used to plan recovery. This burn-severity and vegetation-recovery mapping (using NDVI/NBR indices) feeds into Greece's national antiNERO programme ("National Reforestation Plan, restoration and prevention"), launched in 2022 under the National Recovery and Resilience Facility in response to the country's recurring mega-fires.

The analysis classified roughly 17,600 ha of burned area: 2,291.5 ha slightly damaged, 6,143.8 ha moderately damaged, 7,856.4 ha highly damaged and 1,337.1 ha destroyed. antiNERO targets reforestation, anti-erosion and flood-protection works across 80,000 hectares of fire-affected forest by 2026, with roughly €392 million allocated since inception through EU Recovery and Resilience Facility and national funds, plus a dedicated EU Technical Support Instrument hub for post-fire biodiversity recovery.

The programme is still mid-implementation: Copernicus mapping products and funding allocations are independently verifiable and published, but a post-programme evaluation of realised reforestation success, survival rates or measured erosion reduction on the ground was not found in the sources reviewed, so outcome evidence, as opposed to input/output evidence, remains partial.