The European Commission has allocated €2.3 million from the European Union solidarity fund to help Cyprus recover from the extensive wildfires which broke out in the Limassol and Paphos districts in July, the commission’s executive vice-president for cohesion and reforms Raffaele Fitto announced on Saturday.

He wrote in a post on social media that the amount will cover “emergency operations, infrastructure, housing, and restoration”.

The two wildfires had broken out simultaneously in July, with the fire in the Limassol district having taken the lives of two people, burned an area of 124 square kilometres, and destroyed more than 700 buildings.

Earlier in the year, Cypriot members of the European parliament had demanded more help from the EU to help the island, and the rest of the bloc, fight future wildfires, with Akel’s Giorgos Georgiou offering fierce criticism for a speech made by European commissioner for crisis management Hadjia Lahbib on the matter of wildfires at the time.

“I heard you use the word ‘shall’ 10 times and the word ‘must’ 20 times in your speech. The fires which burned Europe this year have proven that austerity policies are disastrous,” he said, before moving onto the matter of Cyprus.

“Cyprus unfortunately holds the lead, in a negative way, for the proportion of its total territory burned in the last decade … We did not see your solidarity. We asked for two planes from Spain, which, after three months, have not yet arrived,” he said.

He said the EU’s joint firefighting and disaster rescue mechanism, known as rescEU, “perpetuates the shortages of EU countries, recycling scarce resources”.

Elam’s Geadis Geadi also criticised the rescEU mechanism, saying it “left Europe, from Spain to Cyprus, at the mercy of the firestorm”, before outlining his proposal to improve the EU’s response to wildfires.

The following day, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the commission intended to propose the creation of a new European firefighting hub based in Cyprus.

“This summer, we all saw the pictures of Europe’s forests and villages on fire … The scale of the damage is enormous. And we know it is not a one off. Climate change is making each summer hotter, harsher, and more dangerous,” she said during September’s State of the European Union address.

For this reason, she said, “we will propose to create a new European firefighting hub based in Cyprus, which could also support our regional neighbours”.

President Nikos Christodoulides described the proposal at the time as “momentous” and “hugely important”.

The EU solidarity fund was set up in 2002 to offer financial support for disaster-stricken regions in EU member states and candidate countries. States can access funding if the estimated cost of a disaster is more than €3 billion or 0.6 per cent of its gross national income.