We have not yet reached Easter and Forest fires once again dominate the news headlines in Spain. This is an unusual situation, not unprecedented, and we can expect it to normalize in the near future.
The summer of 2022 was extreme. A series of heat waves were concatenated that contributed to tripling the area burned with respect to the long-term average. Climate models tell us that last year’s thermal anomaly will be the norm in 2035. And that in 2050, the anomaly of 2022 will be an anomaly from below: a particularly benign year.
As climatic severity increases and global warming continues, we may succumb to the temptation to attribute the problem of forest fires solely to climate change. That would be a mistake. Fires are a chemical reaction consisting of consuming (oxidising) vegetation. Therefore, managing the vegetation we can alter the behavior of large forest fires.
But have we learned anything from last year? Has the forest management that we prescribed then been applied?
Learned lessons
Experience has shown us that in Spain changes in the management of forest fires occur after catastrophic years. After the summer of 1998, where almost 30,000 hectares burned in a single fire in central Catalonia, the Generalitat firefighters created the Forest Action Reinforcement Group (GRAF). Behind the Guadalajara misfortune of 2005with 11 deaths, the Emergency Military Unit in 2006.
In relation to the measures taken after the last campaign, on August 2, 2022, a modification of the Forest Law. This action has not been accompanied by any other measure once the media flame of last summer’s fires has been extinguished. It therefore seems that this legislative change was a make-up operation to turn off the media hype.
In our work we have shown that in Europe more people die by forest fires than by terrorism. Forest fires therefore constitute a major civil protection problem.
Management strategies to apply
Scientific studies indicate that we must preventively manage an area equivalent to three times the area burned in the fires so that prevention actions are useful. According to marc castellnouGRAF inspector, putting out fires costs 19,000 euros per hectare.
However, preventive actions cost around 2,000 euros per hectare. The extinction represents a non-refundable expense. Prevention, however, allows some return on investment. This is so because the fuels removed can be used as a source of energy (bioenergy), construction (wood) and have other uses.
It would be a mistake to approach the problem of fires from the point of view of profitability, because among other reasons they represent a threat to civil protection. But even from that approach it is difficult to justify the response to the problem of fires based on extinctioninstead of prevention.
Avoid future damage
The Spanish parliaments and European they declared a climate emergency in 2019. Climate change catalyzes the fire problem and exacerbates it. It is urgent to address the underlying problem.
If the weather conditions of the past repeat themselves this summer, and if the drought suffered by areas such as Valencia or Catalonia worsens, it is very likely that this summer will be as bad as the last oneor even worse.
We are generating a debt from the burned area: the large accumulations of fuel in the areas that are now burning in Castellón and Teruel they are common in much of our landscapes. And this lack of management generates a debt that nature collects in the form of a mega-fire, eliminating excess fuel. A debt that the fires are collecting year after year, and that is increasing while we limit our measures to declarations in the BOE. A debt that we can settle through the orderly extraction of the fuel.
Unfortunately, now we can no longer prevent the mega-fires this summer, but we can start working so that the problem in 2024 is less serious.
Priority action areas
The areas where we must act most urgently are those that burn the most. This includes bushes, abandoned plantations and protected areas.
Almost half of the surface burned last year occurred precisely in protected areas, while these only occupy 40% of the surface. This implies a particularly important condition in these areas, contrary to what is popularly believed.
The idea that cutting down trees is ecocide, arboricide and an ecological crime has settled in the collective imagination. The reality is that we suffer an epidemic of trees: we have too much vegetation and that aggravates the problem of forest fires.
The protection paradox implies that the more we “protect& rdquor; landscapes, that is, the more we exclude them from human activities, the more the probability of suffering a mega-fire increases.
Forestry, or forest science, is a discipline with two centuries of history. It teaches us how to generate safe landscapes that are resistant to climate change and fires, that store carbon, protect against erosion and host biodiversity. And all this while we get many of the green resources that we need in a context of climate emergency and ecological transition.
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After all, that’s what science is for: solving problems.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.