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Forest fires: Record burned areas this year in Europe

While the peak fire season is not yet over, the provisional toll is rising in the European Union with already more than 6,600,000 hectares burned since January, a record number for that time period since 2006 when the first satellite data.

Since January 1, fires have destroyed 6,627,760 hectares of forests in the European Union, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) updated today. EFFIS has been producing comparative statistics since 2006 thanks to the satellite images of the European Copernicus programme.

France had seen worse years in the 1970s, before European data existed. But the year 2022 is the worst in 16 years, according to those numbers, in large part because of two major wildfires in a row in the Gironde department in southwestern France, where German, Polish and Austrian firefighters arrived this week to help.

The situation is also serious in central Europe: it took firefighters more than ten days in July to bring under control the biggest fire in Slovenia’s recent history, helped by a population that had mobilized to the point where the government had to ask residents to stop giving gifts to firefighters.

But as it has no dedicated firefighting planes, Slovenia was forced to ask Croatia for help, which sent a plane, before recalling it to fight its own fires. The Slovenian government is now considering the purchase of its first firefighting planes.

Also very spectacular was last week’s fire in Berlin, Germany, which started in a police ammunition depot in a forest in the middle of a drought, and was quickly brought under control. While until now it has not had such fires, the German capital is now increasingly threatened due to its large wooded areas.

But the zone most affected by the fires is the Iberian Peninsula. Spain, in a drought following this year’s heat waves, saw 2,462,780 hectares destroyed by fires, particularly in northwestern Galicia. However, the situation has improved with the drop in temperatures.

Portugal has also been fighting for more than a week against a fire in the Serra da Estrela mountain region, whose peak reaches around 2,000 meters.

Growth in central Europe

In terms of burnt areas, Spain is followed by Romania (1,505,280 hectares), Portugal (752,770 hectares) and France (612,890 hectares).

In the summer season alone, “2022 is already a record year,” EFFIS coordinator Jesus San-Miguel tells AFP. The previous record for Europe was set in 2017, when 4,209,130 ​​hectares had burned by August 13 and 9,880,870 hectares within a year.

“I hope we won’t have the October this year that we had that year,” he continues; 4,000,000 acres had then burned across Europe in one month.

The unusual drought prevailing in Europe, combined with heat waves, facilitates the outbreak of fires.

These extreme drought conditions were more often observed in countries that get rain from the Mediterranean, but now they have been observed in central Europe,” which had so far avoided these meteorological phenomena, adds Jesus San-Miguel.

For example, the Czech Republic saw the fire burn more than 10,000 hectares, an area small compared to other countries, but 158 ​​times larger than the average for the period 2006-2021, when fires were negligible.

In central Europe, the burned surfaces are therefore still limited compared to the hundreds of thousands of hectares in Spain, France or Portugal. Apart from the fires in Croatia, there were only three fires in Slovenia and five in Austria.

But the continued rise in temperatures across Europe is expected to reinforce the trend.

Source: Capital

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