“Nature is blamed for failings that are man’s
and well-run rivers have to change their plans”
Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, novelist (1890-1971)

“The flood has changed our lives. My children are scared every time it rains. My son had a panic attack when the bridges in Faenza were closed recently, because he thought the same thing would happen. And I can’t help but look at the river every time I drive by. I live from day to day now. Everything can change in an instant. You know, I lost everything in half an hour”. Francesca Placci, 42, a cook, lives in the Italian city of Faenza, in the province of Ravenna, in Emilia-Romagna. Faenza, located 50 kilometres south-east of Bologna, was flooded three times in 18 months during the 2023-2024 biennium.

As in Thessaly and Valencia, the inhabitants of this Italian city are still living with fear and anxiety about the future after this triple shock.  “Every time it rains, I am afraid. Our confidence is gone. We no longer know what we can rely on. This place is not safe. Nothing will ever be the same again. My husband is more tired now, more silent. In our community we continue to help each other, but the state has never been there for us. Instead, all we got was a mess of bureaucracy and crumbs of financial support. We have learned to rely only on ourselves and the people around us,” says Simona Bacchilega, 54.

Her voice echoes and joins those of the inhabitants of Palamas Karditsa, Mandra, Volos and Pelion, the neighbourhoods of Valencia in Spain, the Danube regions of Hungary and Slovakia, in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Saarland in Germany, in the provinces of Karlovac and Sisk-Moslavina in Croatia and in dozens of other affected areas.

Thessaly, September 2023, photo: Marios Lolos 

The deadliest natural disaster

Floods are the most common natural disaster. They account for 44% of all natural disasters worldwide and cause almost half of all deaths. Today, 1.81 billion people (23% of the world’s population) are considered to be directly exposed to the risk of severe flooding. Their frequency has more than doubled since 2004, scientists say, due to the acceleration of the hydrological cycle caused by anthropogenic climate change. 

Over the past 30 years, floods in Europe have affected 5.5 million people, caused more than 3,000 deaths and resulted in economic losses of more than €170 billion. But these are just journalistic estimates.

How many people have actually died in floods in each region of Europe over the last decade? How many and which specific areas in each country and region have been affected, and which infrastructure has been hit hardest, especially in the last two years? And how can we protect ourselves effectively? The publicly available scientific data on floods in Europe is fragmentary, incomplete and uninformative.

MIIR’s month-long cross-border journalistic data research – unique in Europe – as part of EDJNET, has managed to combine data from three different open databases to create the first comprehensive pan-European database on floods, recording the number of floods, flood victims and flood deaths in all European regions from 2014 to 2024. 

In addition, we have created a separate database based on satellite data for the last two years (2023-2024), which accurately records the extent of flooding and its impact on land and infrastructure in all European regions of 17 Member States.

The devastating impact in numbers

Between 2014 and 2024, data collected by Copernicus, the EM-DAT public database and the Hanze database show that at least 681,076 people were affected by floods in 24 European countries. However, the actual number of people affected is higher as data is not available for all floods. 

Based on the existing data we have analysed, at least 1,579 people have died directly as a result of floods in Europe over the last decade.

Together with Michalis Diakakis, a hydrogeologist and assistant professor at the University of Athens, they study flood fatalities in Europe, having contributed to the most reliable (because it includes all events with at least one fatality) large-scale database on flood fatalities in the Euro-Mediterranean region (Flood Fatalities from the Euro-Mediterranean region FFEM-DB). The number of deaths in 14 Euro-Mediterranean countries over the last 35 years exceeds 3000.

Excess mortality

The official death toll in Thessaly in 2023 was 17. However, a recent study by the Centre for Research and Training in Public Health, Health Policy and Primary Health Care, published by the Greek daily Efsyn. (“Plains mourns 335 dead, not 17 from Daniel”, 16.3.2025), shows that the actual total number of deaths was 20 times higher in the first quarter after the floods. In total, 335 people died within three months, mostly from cardiovascular and/or respiratory problems. 

As noted by meteo.gr (K. Papagiannaki, K. Lagovardos, G. Kyros, 18/10/2024), in the last 45 years Greece has experienced 70 deadly floods due to heavy rainfall, resulting in 190 deaths. There is an alarming trend: the number of deaths caused by floods is increasing over time. In the last decade, for example, half of all recorded deaths have occurred in the last 45 years. 

According to the Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development of the National Observatory of Athens, in the Balkans as a whole, floods with more than 10 fatalities occur every 6.5 years, while floods with more than 22 fatalities occur every 12 years.

Our research shows that in the last two years, 17 European countries have experienced 32 floods, affecting a total of 427.336,2 hectares – an area 1.5 times the size of Luxembourg – according to satellite data from Copernicus Emergency Management Mapping. 

The area flooded in Europe over the past two years is almost twice the size of Greater London and larger than Rome, Paris and Berlin combined.

Analysis of the 61 affected areas shows that provincial areas suffered the most extensive flooding, with some 138.663 hectares flooded. Similarly, 98.447 hectares were affected in intermediate (semi-urban) areas and 88.468 hectares in urban areas.

Thessaly, September 2023, photo: Marios Lolos 

The largest flood in Europe in the last two years started on 5 September 2023 in the Thessaly region of Greece, affecting almost 1,223,750 hectares, of which 92% was agricultural land. The storm directly claimed the lives of 17 people, affected 44,000 inhabitants in Karditsa, Trikala, Magnesia and Larissa and resulted in the death of more than 200,000 animals.

The actual extent of the flood in Thessaly

Until now, the area flooded in Thessaly seemed to be less than 1 million hectares (72.000 hectares was the first official report from the Athens Observatory), but our analysis shows that the actual extent of the disaster is much greater than what has been reported in the press (up to 80.000 hectares).

It turns out that the total area affected in the whole of Thessaly was 122.374,7 hectares, which is more than 50% more than the initial estimates). This is because our measurement includes the ‘flood footprint’ recorded by the Copernicus satellites – areas where water was present but had receded by the time the satellite image was taken. As Copernicus told MIIR, “we assume with a very high probability that a flood has occurred where traces of it are detected in the satellite images”.

 Snapshot from the Copernicus website, showing the diagonal lines of the Thessaly flood track on 9 September 2023. Retrieved 25.3.2025.

Our data shows that Thessaly also experienced the most significant damage to the transport network in the whole of Europe over the last two years, with 1,590 km of roads and almost 149 km of rail infrastructure damaged. 

Germany has been the worst performer in Europe in this category over the last two years, with 209.8 km of long-distance power lines and cables and 117.7 km of local power lines and cables affected.

Flooding of the Saar River, Saarland Germany, 18.05.2024. Source: Berit Kessler / Shutterstock.com

Flooding in Valencia, Dana, October 2024. Source: Guillermo Gutiérrez Carrascal / El Confidencial.

These data show that inland floods at municipal and provincial level, often caused by heavy rainfall, overflowing rivers or poor drainage, have affected a larger area than coastal floods.

However, areas close to the water appear to be more vulnerable to flooding, with the majority of floods in a decade occurring in coastal areas, particularly in Spain, France and Italy.

As was shown for the floods in a parallel investigation by the Spanish El Confidencial, the areas most affected in Valencia have lower levels of income per capita and, at the same time, the houses built there, where land is cheaper, are less prepared to cope with this type of event. The five Spanish provinces with the highest number of buildings in flood-prone areas at risk of flooding are, in order, Murcia, Seville, Valencia, Alicante and Tarragona. 

Flooding in Valencia, Dana, October 2024. Source: Guillermo Gutiérrez Carrascal / El Confidencial.

The last three and a half decades have been among the most flood-rich periods in Europe in the last 500 years. Scientists have shown (Current European flood-rich period exceptional compared with past 500 years, Nature, 2000) that this period differs from other similar flood-rich periods in terms of magnitude, air and sea temperatures and seasonality. The summer of 2024 was the warmest ever recorded in Europe and worldwide. Note that for each additional degree Celsius of global average temperature, the intensity of precipitation increases by about 7%.

The biggest problem is that sea temperatures in the Mediterranean have risen. The critical limit is a water temperature of 26 degrees Celsius. “When this is exceeded, the meteorological system that passes over an area is enriched with enormous additional moisture, and all this acts as both an accelerator and a magnifier of the phenomenon,” explains Professor Nikitas Mylopoulos, a professor at the University of Thessaly. 

Such a condition leads to the famous Omega cyclones, as happened with Daniel in Thessaly. “In the same region, two phenomena that are supposed to occur every 500 and 1000 years have occurred in just three years. This automatically means that all the alarm bells have to go off, because the return periods change, all the statistical distributions change and, of course, the whole way of coping and planning changes”.

 “Governments insist on dealing only with the day after the disaster (post disaster), instead of taking preventive measures (risk-cost benefit). Between 2017-2021, Greece was given about €100 million in flood compensation alone. Only for Janus (a Mediterranean cyclone that hit the Mediterranean and mainly Greece in September 2020), 38 million euros were given, 7 million euros in state compensation and 31 million euros in insurance compensation,” notes Katerina Papagiannaki, a scientist at the National Observatory of Athens. 

The same is said by Nikitas Mylopoulos, professor at the University of Thessaly, director of the Laboratory of Hydrology and Analysis of Water Systems, making it clear that the only way to deal with the situation is to draw up a Holistic Flood Protection Plan with a series of projects that will “cooperate” with each other. 

Smart dams

“Flood management is very important,” says Mylopoulos. “It relates to how we with our projects will direct, guide the flood volumes as safely as possible to avoid major disasters. This is done first of all with the mountain hydrology projects: small earthen dams high up in the mountains, where the phenomenon starts, in the small streams. So that’s where you put the first stop. Second needed, smaller small and medium-sized dams and dikes downstream. And not the pharaonic big dams. Small dams, but set up smartly, in the areas that actually do the job. Thirdly, reforestation is needed throughout the region, and enhancing natural protection, vegetation cover is crucial in flood mitigation. And, of course, we must finally provide for flood zones, according to their risk, which are usually currently either built-up areas or fields of intensive farming. These zones must be returned with lighter land uses. The rivers must be given back their old meanderings, which play a role in reducing the risk. 

Θεσσαλία, Σεπτέμβριος 2023, κακοκαιρία Daniel, φωτό: Μάριος Λώλος 

Simona Bacchilega, a worker in the municipality of Faenza, on the evening of 16 May 2023 was receiving messages from friends to leave her home. 

“We lived in the centre of the city, ten metres above the surface of the river, and we weren’t worried. We didn’t think the sewers could overflow. Until the moment we heard a strange sound coming from the bathroom and there was a terrible stench. Suddenly we saw water coming from the yard, despite the sandbags my husband and neighbor had placed. The water was coming in non-stop. I quickly grabbed a backpack, put in clothes, a flashlight, water. We went out into the street. I realized that my water was reaching my waist.We spent the entire first night awake, sitting in the dark. The power had been out since 9 o’clock at night. Looking outside, I could see the water rising in my car. “Not the car,” I thought. “I just unloaded it!”

The river will take it all away’

“I was thinking of my aunt who used to tell us, ‘The river will take it all away’,” Simona recalls. “The elderly neighbor across the street was talking to us from his window. His wife was on dialysis, and all night long we exchanged glances. He was a professor, a great man. He lost his entire library. I used to watch him look at his books in the water. The next day helicopters were flying all the time, and we didn’t know what was happening.”

For a while they stayed with some neighbors. “When we were able to return home, we realized we had to fend for ourselves. No one helped us. If you wanted water, you had to find it yourself. Volunteers and organized help never reached our area. Then we started to clean up.” 18 months later, in September 2024, Faenza, like dozens of areas in central Europe, was flooded again by the Boris storm.

Satellite image of the Italian city of Faenza from ​ESA/NASA, May 2023

That same night, 42-year-old cook Francesca Placci lost what she had painstakingly built over a lifetime. “My apartment was completely submerged, the water reached up to 3 cm from the ceiling,” she says.

Raffaela Paladini, an expert in trauma management after a disaster, visited Faenza as an “emergency psychologist” providing assistance to dozens of people. “Such a situation certainly has a traumatic impact. People who go about their daily lives as we all do, at some point in time find themselves in an emergency situation faced with something that disrupts their daily routine. This interruption initially causes confusion, a sense of disorientation, emptiness and despair. It can then trigger very different emotions, such as anger, rage and guilt.”

Flood in Faenza, Italy, 17 May 2023. Source: Dario Argenti / Shutterstock.com

“We are financially exhausted. Everything needed to be replaced. The frustration was growing as there was no government support. I spent months looking for help, knocking on doors of public services, but in vain. But the worst part was the psychological impact. Every time it rained, I had an anxiety attack. I couldn’t sleep, waking up in the middle of the night to check if the river had swollen again. My mother, who was always strong, began to show signs of dementia. She was no longer the same.”

And for 66-year-old retiree Mirella Emiliani, everything has changed. “I used to pay attention to appearance, I had nice clothes, an organized home. Now, I have nothing. I don’t even have my old photos. The flood has changed my relationships with people. My few real friends did everything they could to help me. Others just disappeared. When it rains, I’m still scared. I think I can’t go through the same thing again. No one warned us in time. Nothing was done right. Now, I live day by day, because I learned that life can change in an instant.” 

However, all the affected people say almost the same thing: “this disaster has changed me, but it has also highlighted the power of solidarity”. Andrea Bazzocchi returned home after 1.5 years of suffering. “We are trying to rebuild our lives, step by step; this experience has taught us a lot, but we cannot live in fear. We move forward with optimism.”

The cross-border data research was organised and coordinated by the Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting (MIIR.gr) in the framework of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet).

The data collection, analysis and visualization was carried out by Konstantina Maltepioti. The data analysis was checked by the Deutsche Welle team. The illustrations were created by Louisa Karageorgiou.

A total of 6 EDJNet members participated in the survey, which was conducted from November 2024 to March 2025: MIIR (Greece), Atlatszo (Hungary), Facta (Italy), El Confidencial, Civio (Spain), PressOne (Romania).

The survey was published on 29 March 2025 in www.miir.gr and www.efsyn.gr. 

See the scrollytelling of the survey here.
Read the methodology of the survey here.

Research – Text: Janine Louloudi, Maria Álvarez Del Vayo, Lucas Laursen, Ter García, Carmen Torrecillas, Adrian Maqueda
Data analysis – Illustrations: Civio 

At the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, the new occupant of the ministerial office presented his credentials a week ago. And it was exactly what anyone familiar with Makis Voridis’ path in the far-right, would expect. Appearing at the House Committee on Public Administration, Public Order and Justice (19/3), he was quick to announce that he personally made the decision to withdraw the provision of a bill that extended until the end of September the deadline for submitting applications for legalization of immigrants who have lived in Greece for more than three years and have found an employer (Article 205, para. 2) – a procedure that had been proposed by his predecessor Dimitris Kairidis, in an attempt to meet the pressing need for a workforce. He then announced that any further decision “should be linked to more restrictive policies to deal with illegal immigration from now on”. A few days later (27/3) during a visit to the ministry, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis would additionally state that legal immigration to Greece “must meet established labour market needs”.

Residence permits, initially temporary and then long-term, are the basic “paper” for proving legal residence in the country and the first step in the long process towards acquiring Greek citizenship for those foreigners who do not possess significant athletic or other qualifications to “offer exceptional services or serve an exceptional interest in the country” (Article 13 of the Code of Greek Citizenship), in order to receive honorary naturalization. Such naturalizations vary considerably, are usually quick and depend only on the political will of the government.

A very characteristic example is that of athletes who were naturalized in order to wear the colours of the Hellenic National Team, such as for example the Olympiakos basketball player Thomas Walkup, who received Greek citizenship in 2023 and participated with the Greek team in the 2024 Olympics. At least 25 athletes competed in Paris having received citizenship by decree of a European country, including Ekaterina Antropova, a Russian volleyball player naturalized by Italy in 2023, and Russian wrestler Dauren Kurugliev who gave Greece a silver medal.

However for people like Natalia, who has been living in Greece for the last 28 years, acquiring citizenship still seems like an elusive dream. She and her husband left Moldova in 1997, when the country was in a severe economic crisis, leaving behind two children. They both worked hard – she as a cleaner and housekeeper, her husband as a handyman –  and managed to bring over and raise their daughters here. The years went by, constantly renewing their residence permits, until in 2014 Natalia heard her daughters say, “Mom, we have our friends here, our studies here, we’re not going back.” It was around the time when the girls went to university, obtained Greek citizenship and encouraged her to apply for Greek citizenship.

“Citizenship unlocks the rights that individuals should have as full members in a state,” says migration researcher Jelena Dzankic, co-director of the Global Citizenship Observatory and a part-time professor at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.

However, European countries only naturalise a small proportion of their foreign residents each year. According to the latest available figures, in 2022 the European Union, with a population of 448.4 million people, had naturalised less than 1 million people. In total, European countries host 41.2 million foreigners. Sweden naturalised the most in relation to its total population, followed by the Netherlands and Italy. Austria, Estonia and Latvia, on the other hand, naturalised the smallest proportion. Most citizenship decisions in European countries in 2022 concerned immigrants from Morocco, Syria and Albania.

The prohibitive terms

Among the factors influencing naturalisation rates, the terms requested by states for people to obtain citizenship play an important role. Firstly, the documentation of the total number of years of legal residence, ranging up to 10 years in Spain, Austria and Italy and 7 years in Greece.

At the same time, additional integration terms, such as certain years of work, language and cultural examinations, documents from the applicants’ countries of origin, are also required, which can act as barriers to entry. Persons applying for naturalisation through other channels, such as refugees or spouses of citizens, face similar requirements. There are also work or income requirements. In more than a dozen European countries, one of the requirements for citizenship is a stable source of income.

After a long wait, Natalia took her exams in 2023 to obtain Greek citizenship, spending money on the necessary documents and hours of endless studying without help. She managed to pass the exams, but her application was rejected as, working as a cleaner, she did not meet the minimum required annual income of 8,450 euros for the relevant period between 2014-2019. “I have been here legally since 1997 and all these years I have been living somehow, right? But not with what was required”, she explains to MIIR in frustration.

It took nine years from Natalia’s initial application to the announcement of the final decision on her citizenship. The corresponding time in Spain and Italy can be as long as ten years, while in Greece it is six years, although the law stipulates that the administration has 12 months to examine applications for naturalisation. There are currently more than 30,000 pending applications in our country.

Natalia, however, decided not to take the exam again, as she is now 61 years old and does not think she will ever be able to meet the income threshold. She will simply try to renew her residence permit, a process that the NGO Generation 2.0 Red estimates may take at least two years. That’s because in 2024, pending residence permit applications for third-country nationals reached 280,474, with about 32,650 new applications added in one year, from November 2023 to November 2024.

As Generation 2.0 Red reports in its latest report on Monitoring Administrative Procedures for Obtaining Citizenship (Report #2, May 2024 – August 2024)), “a key and insurmountable barrier for most applicants is the requirement to prove minimum income, which leads to many application denials. Acquiring citizenship for people who have lived in the country for years and have developed strong ties with it, should not depend on economic factors”.

In Greece in 2023, 4,931 decisions for naturalisation of migrants were issued (latest available data from the General Secretariat for Citizenship), of which 3,515 (71.28%) were positive. The majority of them (73.88%) concerned immigrants from Albania. However, three out of ten applications (1,416 in number) for citizenship were rejected.

Strangers in their own land

There are also thousands of pending citizenship applications in Greece in the case of second-generation immigrants, reaching 18,822 at the end of March 2022 (latest available data), with delays in the processing of applications exceeding four years.

In this case, citizenship is granted, at the request of the parents, either to minor children born in the country and enrolled in the first grade of primary school (strict conditions apply regarding the status and years of residence of their parents in the country), or to minor children who have completed nine grades of primary and secondary education in a Greek school or six grades of secondary education or have a high school diploma and a higher education degree. 

In 2023 the acceptance rate of second generation citizenship applications was 97.3% (7,514 positive decisions), in 2022 98.38% (6,867) and in 2021 97.03% (5,154).

In 2022, Italy and Spain were the two European countries with the highest total number of naturalisations (213,716 and 181,581 respectively) according to Eurostat. However, almost a third of these involve people born there. The proportion is similar in Austria (32.69%), but higher in Greece (53.93%), where more than half of the 12,733 people granted citizenship were born here.

The laws of EU member states tend to favour citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis) rather than by place of birth (jus soli), but several countries allow people born there to become citizens regardless of their parents’ nationality in special cases.

Five countries automatically grant citizenship to people born there to foreign parents who meet certain conditions, according to the Global Citizenship Observatory (Globalcit). Portugal offers citizenship to children born there whose foreign parents have lived there for a year. Ireland does so after three years. Germany does it after five years, from June 2024, while Luxembourg and France automatically grant citizenship to people born there who can prove they have lived in the country for 5 years when they turn 18. In France, more than a quarter of the approximately 114,500 naturalizations in 2022 involved children aged 13 to 17 whose parents filed an application for their naturalisation, despite the provision for automatic citizenship at age 18.

In contrast, fifteen other EU countries do not allow the automatic naturalisation of children born there to foreign parents, but offer simplified procedures, such as reducing the time required for prior legal residence. There is no common rule: while in Spain, parents of children born in the country can apply for their child’s citizenship after one year of legal residence, in Italy they cannot apply until the child turns 18. Sweden requires three years of residence, not only for children born there, but for all minors residing in the country, regardless of their place of birth.

In all these countries, the first barrier to naturalisation is the acquisition of legal residence. “When children are born to parents who are in an irregular situation, they are also in an irregular situation,” explains Diego Fernández-Maldonado, a migration lawyer for the civil society organisation Caritas in Madrid, Spain. Economist Christina Gathmann of the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research, calls it a “missed opportunity” that most countries do not recognise birthright citizenship for children of foreign parents: “Europe is falling behind or not thinking about the benefits, because very few countries in Europe have birthright citizenship.”

Stateless and deprived of rights

There is another category of people that nobody talks about. It concerns at least 381,000 foreigners, according to UNHCR figures, living in the EU without official citizenship, a situation that forces them to live as invisible people without basic rights.

Many stateless people come from states that have disappeared or may have been displaced by war or for other reasons. Others have no nationality, because of gaps in the laws of their country of birth: they may be the children of stateless persons or of people whose countries do not recognise as citizens the children born to their citizens abroad. Some people are stateless because the country where they live does not recognise their country of origin as a state, as in much of the European Union (EU) for people from Palestine or Western Sahara.

In Sweden the number of recognised stateless persons increased from 5,300 in 2005, the first year with available data, to 42,511 in 2022. In Greece, the number of stateless persons reached 4,488 in 2022, exactly the same as in 2021.

Since the middle of the last century, two UN conventions have aimed to guarantee minimum rights for stateless persons. First, the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which defines which people fall into this category and requires signatory countries to provide them with access to basic rights that are at least the same as those enjoyed by legally resident foreigners. 

Then there is the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which limits the requirements that stateless persons must meet to obtain a nationality. However, France, Greece and Slovenia have not yet ratified the 1961 Convention, and Cyprus, Estonia and Poland have not even acceded to the 1954 Convention, according to the latest report on statelessness by the European Migration Network (EMN), an EU-funded intergovernmental organisation. 

In 2022, according to the latest Eurostat data, the 27 EU countries granted citizenship to a total of 7,296 stateless persons. As of 2013, the first year for which data is available, at least 67,600 stateless persons were granted citizenship, with more than half in Sweden.

Only 18 countries have simplified access to citizenship for stateless people, according to Globalcit. The process, however, varies from country to country and facilitations are not always provided. Ireland does not require stateless persons to have lived in the country for a certain period of time. In Greece, if a stateless person has lived in the country for 3 years, they can apply for citizenship. Belgium reduces the residence requirement from 5 years to 2 years, while 5 years of residence is also the criterion in Germany. Nine other EU countries, including Spain, Portugal and Romania, do not facilitate the acquisition of citizenship for stateless persons.

All EU countries, except Cyprus and Romania, grant citizenship to people born in the country who would otherwise be stateless. In Greece, children born to stateless parents acquire Greek citizenship if they are born in the country.

More obstacles on the path to citizenship

Citizenship acquisition is in any case the only status that recognises the holder as an equal member of society, giving him/her equal access to rights, but also a sense of security that there is no scenario of returning to the country of origin.

At a time when far-right forces are dragging European rulers towards tightening migration policy, it is certain that the challenges of acquiring citizenship will increase in member states. In Greece, the recent landmark decision of the Council of the State, which terminates Turkey’s recognition as a safe third country for refugees of five nationalities (Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Somalia), is expected to increase pressure on an already overburdened administration where, without realistic and systematic solutions, the problems of delays in residence permits and citizenship, instead of being corrected, will worsen, leaving thousands of people in limbo. 

*The cross-border data investigation was conducted as part of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet).

The project was coordinated by the Spanish journalism group Civio, with the participation of the following newsrooms: Deutsche Welle (Germany), Noteworthy (Ireland), OBCT (Italy), Dennik N (Slovakia) and MIIR (Greece).

To read more on the methodology of the investigation, please check the boxes on methodology at the end of Civio’s reports: here, here and here.