Europe is on fire: for days, the temperatures are soar to the stars above 38 °, breaking records and starting massive fires that forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. From Portugal to Spain to Greece, the flames spread like a contagion. In the countryside surrounding Bordeaux, France, 75 square miles have been charred in the past week.
Flames are also breaking out across London, a city not exactly known for this type of fire. Forest fires are, of course, a perfectly natural phenomenon and have periodically restored ecosystems for a new growth throughout history. But in modern times, due to humanity’s interference with the climate and landscape, these fires have morphed into unnatural beasts that instead obliterate ecosystems.
Fire historian Stephen Pyne called it the Pyrocene, the era of flames. In recent years, many factors have conspired to create the massive fires observed in Australia and California. Climate change has created more intense heat waves and longer dry seasons, with more sparkling and ready to burn vegetation.
And human settlement is expanding from urban centers to these increasingly arid wildernesses. In California, for example, people are moving out of coastal regions and moving to cheaper areas in the forested eastern parts of the state. The only constant between fires is that humans will find a way to start thembe it a spark from a cigarette, a lawn mower or a firework.
“In the United States, we have a fire problem in urban wilderness: we define it as people who foolishly move into areas prone to fires”, says Pyne. But in Europe, he says, it’s the opposite: “Europe has an equally big problem, but it’s because people have moved out of the areas.”
In countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece, economic development has triggered migration to cities and away from pastoral industries, such as agriculture and animal husbandry. “That economic change meant that there were not enough people in the landscape to maintain traditional combustion or to maintain traditional land use”says Pyne.
For thousands of years, farmers have routinely burned their land to clean up dead bushes and make way for new growth and to reduce the risk of massive fires. But like California, many modern European communities have turned to a strategy called suppression of fireswhich means quickly putting out fires before they have a chance to spread, destroy property and kill people.
This means that combustible material is piling up in the countryside, ready to burn. As there are now fewer people living in the countryside, and also stricter conservation laws, the forests have grown. Although that is good for wildlife, it also adds fuel to the landscape. With fewer grazing animals chewing on grass, that highly flammable fuel accumulates even more.
“So you start seeing these fires going out, and it’s just relentless”continues Pyne. “In my life as a firefighter, the size of the forests in our country has doubled”, says Marc Castellnou, incident commander for Catalan firefighters and Spain-based fire analyst. “So there has been a change in our society that has become more urban and we are losing landscape management.”
Fires are becoming more difficult to manage, he says, because the land is not actively controlled with thinning of vegetation and deliberate burns. “The problem is that we as a society have only reacted to a problem by developing firefighting capabilities”, says Castellnou. “We didn’t build ecosystem management”.
Demographic change and migration to cities are happening alongside climate change. A Mediterranean climate, both in the region around the Mediterranean Sea and in similar places like California, is already prone to fires. Rainy winters and springs promote plant growthwhich dry out during the dry summer and turn into fuel.
Climate change has made these conditions drier and warmer for longer. “It’s a performance enhancer”, says Pyne. “We are witnessing climate change that magnifies those conditions.”
Controlled fires
“What’s really interesting, though”adds Pyne, “Is to see the fire that begins to spread in central Europe”. This is a more temperate region and historically has not had the regimented wet-dry cycle of the Mediterranean. But now that it is suffering more and more extreme heatwaves, the fires can feed on conditions that change hourly during these heat events, even if the region has not already been blocked by a years long droughtas happened in California.
If a hot, dry wind blows through, it can quickly suck moisture from grasses, twigs and shrubs – the really flammable stuff. Big trees can retain their moisture and resist burning, but the rest of the vegetation is now relentlessly catching fire.
“You don’t have to dry out the landscape to the point where everything becomes a bait,” says Pyne. “All we have to do is have enough forethought to transport the valuable fuels, and so we can have fires that blaze very fast as a result.”
Consequently, the “Fire prevention regime” European, as scientists call it, is transforming: the warmer it gets, the more the behavior of the fire changes. As vegetation becomes dry, so does the amount of energy it releases when it burns. “So the power of the fire increases considerably with the lack of water and these fires will spread faster”says Guillermo Rein, who studies fire at Imperial College London.
“Some of these fires are actually literally impossible to stop.”
Fire scientists say the best way to mitigate the risk is to thin out excess vegetation and make more controlled burns. But Rein points out that this can be a difficult sale to the public. “I come from Spain, I grew up in a world where every fire is absolutely wrong“, He says. Some people resist smoking, which can worsen respiratory conditions such as asthma.
But the alternative is increasingly massive and out of control fires that will create even more smoke, choking communities for days on end. And firefighters take great care to perform controlled burns on days when conditions won’t move smoke to people.
Arguing against fewer flames may seem counterintuitive. But the solution is ignitions more controlled and beneficial: literally fighting fire with fire. “Unfortunately, the real limit is not not having enough people to carry out the prescribed combustion”says Rein. “People who support the concept of prescribed combustion are not enough”.
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