Europe experiences a record summer of area burned by fires: over 650,000 hectares

With the high fire season still underway, the provisional balance of hectares burned in Europe exceeds 660,000 since January, a record at this point of the year since the start of satellite data collection in 2006.

From 1 January the fires destroyed 662,776 hectares of forest across the European Union, according to data updated this Sunday by the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), which since 2006 has been producing comparable statistics thanks to satellite images from the European Copernicus program.

The area most affected by the fires was the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, which suffered two major heatwaves this summer between June and August, 246,278 hectares were burned, mainly in the regions of Galicia, the Castilian province of Zamora (north-west) and Extremadura. The situation has improved in recent days with lower temperatures.

In Portugal, it took firefighters a week to control a fire in the Serra da Estrela Natural Park, recognized by UNESCO, where 17,000 hectares were burned.

Tragedy

France experienced even worse years in the 1970s, before standardized data was established at the European level. But according to those figures in 2022 It was the worst in the past 16 years. largely due to two successive large fires in the Gironde department near Bordeaux (southwest), which this week required reinforcements from German, Polish and Austrian firefighters.

The situation was equally exceptional in central Europe. In July, the fire brigade It took more than ten days to control the largest fire of recent Slovenian history, with the help of a population mobilized with such enthusiasm that the government had to ask the inhabitants to stop donating to the fire brigade.

In the absence of specialized planes to fight the fires, Slovenia had to ask Croatia for help, which sent a plane before bringing it back to put out its own fires. For this reason, the Slovenian government is now considering purchasing its first tanker aircraft.

As for the burned surfaceafter Spain there are Romania (150,528 hectares), Portugal (75,277 hectares) and France (61,289 hectares).

If you take the summer time, “2022 is already a record year”explains Jesús San Miguel, EFFIS coordinator, to AFP.

The previous record in Europe dates back to 2017, when 420,913 hectares burned on 13 August and 988,087 hectares in one year.

“I hope we don’t have the October month we had then”when 400,000 hectares were devastated across Europe, Jesús San Miguel adds.

Climate change

And it is that the exceptional drought that afflicts Europe, coupled with the heat waves, is a devastating formula.

These conditions of extreme drought have been observed until now mainly in the Mediterraneanand now “that’s exactly what happened in central Europe”, stresses Jesús San Miguel.

In the Czech Republic, for example, a fire devastated more than a thousand hectares, little compared to other countries, yet 158 ​​times more important than the 2006-2021 average of this country.

In central Europe, the burnt areas remain small compared to the tens of thousands of hectares devastated in Spain, Portugal or France. In addition to the fires in Croatia, three in Slovenia and five in Austria. Though continuous climate warming in Europe as a whole it risks accentuating the trend.

Source: AFP

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