It advises not to throw “balls out” and blame only climate change but to influence prevention, rural abandonment and improvement of forest management
The dean of the College of Forestry Engineers, Eduardo Rojas Briales, highlighted the “extremely high” incidence that lightning has had this year in the formation of forest fires, compared to the “relatively” low number of fires caused by “arsonists” to cause damage . Along with lightning, he recalls involuntary behavior and urges better management and prevention in a scenario of climate change.
In an interview with Europa Press, Rojas Briales admitted that climate change “generates more stress to the mountain” and “more occasions to burn”, but the answer, in his opinion, cannot be through “throwing balls out and postponing everything to solve climate change, which will be a decades-long fight on a global scale.
Thus, the representative of the forestry engineers urged to act at a local scale and on a “temporarily smaller” scale, acting against rural abandonment and to recover forest management that, in his opinion, “in any case, should be done by the fact of having climatic and orographic conditions that are very prone to fire».
In this context, he attributed responsibility for the fires to climate change, given that it generates more extreme events that previously generated more necromass (snowfall, gales, conditions for more intense insect attacks, droughts); they favor extreme conditions prone to fire, which lead to mega-fires that are, in his opinion, nothing other than the continuity and high load of fuels ready to burn «.
But this drift considers that it depends on the presence or absence of forest management added to agricultural abandonment that increases the continuity and surface of forests and in the transition from scrub forest that generates “highly combustible” formations.
Only a third of what grows in the forests is cut
For this reason, it underlines that by increasing actions in forest management, given that now only a third of what grows in Spanish forests is cut, these would, in turn, be more resistant to climate change, would provide biomass and key materials to be less dependent on external energy, while carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would be reduced.
Other consequences that the dean sees in this action at the local level would be extensive meat production with lower greenhouse gas emissions and higher quality, while the population in “interior Spain” would recover, extinction costs and there would be a greater availability of water, given that the high density of forests «consumes a lot».
In that sense, he stressed that the Ebro has lost “half of its flow in 50 years not because of less precipitation, but because of high ambush.” This battery of measures, according to the dean, would at the same time contribute to improving biodiversity since it ensures that hyperdense masses are not very biodiverse.
Regarding the factors that have determined this year’s fires, which according to data from the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge have burned 162,447.44 hectares, and more than 236,000 according to European observation data from Copernicus, Eduardo Rojas says that it is still early to determine both the “complex” causes and the definitive number of devastated hectares, a process that falls to the forestry agents, now focused on monitoring, extinguishing and preserving the evidence.
For this reason, he trusts that it will not be until the autumn when the affected surfaces and the type of burned soil are “fine-tuned” and attributes the difference in figures from the Ministry and Copernicus to the fact that “always” the definitive extension is less than the estimated initially by satellite.
In any case, he found that “many” of the large fires that have occurred so far this year have been due to lightning left by dry storms and that are more common in the interior and in mountain areas, as well as by machines of harvest or afforestation.
“Above all, in terms of surface and cause, we are facing an extremely high year in lightning causes and normal in involuntary or negligent and relatively low in arsonists, although this is still early to be evaluated,” Rojas Briales predicted, adding that the percentages between cause and surface do not usually coincide.
In fact, he argues that lightning, which is a “modest” origin in the average fire, around 5%, usually affects a larger surface. Specifically, this year several large forest fires (those that consume more than 500 hectares) were caused by these reasons. However, he specifies that lightning “has always been the most important cause” in lightning of this type in Aragon throughout the Iberian System (Cuenca, Soria, interior of Castellón) as well as in the Pyrenees.
Although in Catalonia or Valencia these represent 10 to 20% of the number of affected hectares, which is greater in this type of fire because they occur in more inaccessible places than those caused by human beings.
rural abandonment
However, for the dean the rural abandonment of inland Spain is “much more serious” because there are also fewer troops there and he recommends that the “compensatory” reforestation of the fires be controlled by the forest administrations of the autonomous communities, just as those that pay for public investments so that they are made “with all guarantees” and include insurance that covers the first 30 or 40 years.
Finally, asked about the fear of inhabitants in rural areas about the possibility of changing land use in the burned areas, the dean of the Forestry engineers reiterates that the Forestry Law “only” allows changes in land use for interest general and by express law.
In this way, he qualifies as an “urban legend” that fires are caused by speculation with burned wood and by changes in land use. “This has not been possible since 2006, nor was it a perceptible cause of fires before, as the statistics show,” says Rojas Briales, who points to the president of the PSOE, at the time Minister of the Environment, Cristina Narbona, and to the “horse of the environmentalism’ the inclusion of that provision in the law.
However, regarding the possibility of installing wind farms on land devastated by fire, the dean affirms that they can be established on any mountain, whether it is burned or not, because these do not imply a change in forest use or in the use of land, nor to the property in case it was a public forest. “They are treated like cell towers,” he concludes.
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