Spain is the country that invests the most in extinction per hectare in the world, but this measure is not efficient in dealing with extreme fires, known as “unextinguishable” and with the capacity to burn thousands of hectares in a matter of hours. This is how Lourdes Hernández, a WWF Spain forest fire expert and author of the article, explains it.
“If we continue in this spiral of preventive inaction and putting all our efforts exclusively on extinction, the situation will get worse. We must move from a model that prioritizes investments in advanced extinction devices and ignores the effects of the climate crisis and the accumulation of fuels to another that is committed to promoting profitable and less flammable landscapes”.
The organization establishes in its latest report the characteristics of the fires of the last two decades, and although there has been a decrease in their number and in the area affected, the level of danger has increased and large forest fires (GIF) have become a social problem.
“The increase in areas in which forest land comes into contact with urban areas has transformed what was a rural or environmental problem into true civil protection emergencies”, they declare in the document and add, that only in the year 2022 will GIFs They caused the death of four people, left another ninety wounded and more than thirty thousand evacuated.
According to the organization, the economic and social conflict caused by the fires is also manifested in their increasing intentionality: about 55% were caused and 23% were due to negligence. The remaining percentage is considered to be of unknown cause.
The increase in the frequency of GIFs responds to two causes: climate change and the abandonment of the territory. Hernández argues that in the face of adverse weather conditions -heat waves and drought- fires have a greater tendency to spread, which is combined with a water deficit of the soil and plants that adds vulnerability to the area. Likewise, the existence of homogeneous landscapes, without crops or pastures, turns the land into a highly flammable powder keg.
These fires, in addition, have advanced their arrival, before more seasonal. This year, the first GIF was in March, in Alto Mijares, and razed nearly 5,000 hectares; It was followed by a cluster of fires in Asturias, with some 35,000 hectares burned; and in May it was that of Las Hurdes and Sierra de Gata, with an affectation of close to 11,000 hectares. They all have in common that they occurred before the risk season.
The year 2022 did not bring good figures either. According to WWF data, the total number of hectares affected by fires in Spain was 310,000 -by comparison, this extension is slightly higher than that of the province of Álava-; 61 GIFs were recognized, which triples the annual average of the last decade and was designated as the worst year in Spanish forestry history of this century.
“These enormous events have made 2022 one of the darkest in Spanish forestry history. It is true that the weather conditions were especially adverse. The summer of 2022 was the hottest in the Spanish series. According to Aemet, the temperature average was 2.2°C higher than the average of 1981-2010. These conditions favored the flames spreading very easily,” adds the organization in the same document.
“No matter how many devices are added to the extinguishing operations, it is very difficult to put out these fires; what is needed in Spain, and actually globally, is prevention,” says Hernández. The model proposed by WWF seeks, in line with this objective, to favor “resilient, alive, profitable and much less flammable” landscapes.
The proposal made to the Government of Spain includes the development of a state strategy for the comprehensive prevention of forest fires, and another for extensive livestock; the reactivation of the Law for the Sustainable Development of the Rural Environment and the reorientation of aid from the CAP.
The state strategy for the comprehensive prevention of forest fires, says Hernández, has already been approved: the Committee to Fight Forest Fires (CLIF) and the sectoral conference on the Environment took charge of it. However, its nature is not binding, which means that its compliance is not mandatory.
WWF requests in this sense, that the agreed measures be developed, with the prioritization of those most vulnerable areas. Specifically, it is proposed to achieve the adaptation of 1% of the national forest landscape per year -260,000 hectares- and 100% of the urban-forest interface zones (areas in which the forest land comes into contact with urbanized areas). .
It is different in the case of the Law for the Sustainable Development of the Rural Environment. “It is put in a drawer, with relatively positive measures, which today are not approved,” the fire expert alleges for this newspaper. The objective, both of this law and of the reorientation of PAC aid, would be to increase the possibility of “living with dignity” for the rural population, through greater investment in producers who provide a social service and not so much an industrial one.
WWF concludes that all these measures are consistent not only with each other, but also with the message that they have previously launched in reports such as Grazing against fires, from the year 2022.
