The effects of the climate crisis prolong the forest fire season from March to November, which are increasingly violent due to the lack of landscape management. The recent reactivation of the Tenerife fire reminds us that these incidents are no longer just a summer threat.
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) made these considerations this Wednesday, at the end of the summer campaign against forest fires that the Government carried out for the first time in history due to the arrival of an episode of unusually high temperatures for this time of year in large areas. from Spain.
This summer was one of the smallest burned areas in the country in the last decade, with some 85,000 hectares burning. However, those that existed were 9.5% larger than the average, which have burned more than 500 hectares. “The fires are becoming more and more aggressive. Therefore, although there are fewer fires, the area that burns is greater,” according to WWF.
The climate crisis, with effects such as decreased rainfall and increasingly earlier heat waves, alters the distribution of fires throughout the year. For WWF, the high fire risk season is no longer limited to July and August, but extends from March to November and links winter, spring and summer fires.
This year is being “especially unusual” in terms of the distribution of fires throughout the calendar, according to WWF. Between March and May, those in Castellón and Teruel stood out, and also some in Asturias with “extreme” behavior, more typical of July or August.
“The high temperatures, together with the lack of rain during the winter and a large water deficit in the soil, caused the fire to find forests that were enormously stressed and much more vulnerable to high-intensity fires,” stressed WWF.
In May, Las Hurdes and the Sierra de Gata (Cáceres) also experienced another large fire that left some 11,000 hectares burned. These fires, in territories that burn recurrently, reflect that the climate crisis is not the only cause, but rather acts as an aggravation of the structural problems that the Spanish forest has been experiencing for years, including the rural exodus, the aging of the population, the abandonment of uses and exploitations or the general absence of forest management.
The most extensive fire was in Tenerife in August, with almost 13,600 hectares burned, about 9,000 of them in the Corona Forestal Natural Park, the largest protected area in the Canary Islands and with areas of great natural value due to the presence of endemic species and threatened.
In addition, it was one of the most complex in the last 40 years in the archipelago, putting several population centers at risk and causing the evacuation of thousands of people. Proof of its complexity has been its recent and unexpected reactivation last week.
On the other hand, the escalation, in the magnitude and virulence of the fires recorded this year in the world, has become "the new paradigm of 'megafires' towards which the projections of the climate emergency point", according to WWF.
More than 100 people have lost their lives on both sides of the Mediterranean. In Canada more than 15 million hectares burned. In Hawaii, there was a destroyed city, more than 100 fatalities and nearly 1,000 missing.
“All of this highlights the need to dedicate a budget not only to extinction, but also to the planning and management of the landscape to prevent this type of catastrophe,” said WWF, which called on the Spanish Government for a State Strategy for Comprehensive Fire Prevention. Foresters.
“The territory can be used and conserved at the same time. And this is the great challenge. Being able to manage and adapt the territory with multiple objectives: preventing fires, adapting it to climate change, conserving biodiversity and contributing to the demographic challenge in rural areas,” added Lourdes Hernández, forest fire expert at WWF Spain.
The Declaration on the management of large forest fires in Spain, promoted by the Pau Costa Foundation, identifies the need to invest 1,000 million euros per year to promote forest management on a national scale.
