Reacción a "Extreme heat and wind keep numerous fires burning on the peninsula"

With so many days of heatwave and extreme fire risk, is it normal to have so many fires at the same time, or is this unusual?

"Firstly, we cannot assess an annual campaign based on a few critical weeks. Almost every year there are a few weeks when the weather is difficult in certain areas. Second, to identify trends reliably, we need to look at a minimum of five years, but preferably 10 years. Unfortunately, MITECORD stopped publishing its ten-year analytical series in 2015, which deprives us of the perspective of developments since 2016."

What is the outlook for how things will evolve?

"I am not a meteorologist. It seems that the weather will normalise at the beginning of next week. It is also key when the autumn rains begin, both in the inland area of the NW (Ourense, León, Zamora, Cáceres, Ávila) and in the Mediterranean.

What is your assessment of the fires so far this summer?

"Firstly, we should point out that of the two fire seasons, the post-winter season (March-April) in the NW mountains and the summer season, which has had virtually no impact on the Cantabrian coast, the former has been exceptionally favourable due to the absence of sustained southerly winds. Secondly, the fires in Torrefeta i Florejacs (Lleida) in June and Tres Cantos recently in Madrid, or earlier in Los Angeles (United States), show that the term “forest fires” has become obsolete and should be replaced by a new one, as is being done in North America with the term “wildland fire”, which is not easy to translate.

The urban-forest interface and agricultural areas are also highly combustible under certain conditions and, in the former case, distract many personnel, often causing fires that could have been extinguished at an early stage to spread due to neglect. Thirdly, the fact that a critical wave of fires occurs during a period with less political or sporting news carries the risk of media overexposure, which encourages the overemphasis of anecdotal aspects, the search for scapegoats and overly simplistic and ineffective solutions, and a loss of focus.

Spanish forests have grown in size since 1970 and, according to the latest figures, from 11.8 million hectares (23.3%) to 18.5 million hectares (36.6%), representing an increase of 57% in 50 years. However, in terms of biomass, the growth has been even more intense, reaching 160%. It should be noted that of this increase of 6.7 million hectares, only a maximum of 1.5 million correspond to reforestation, while the rest comes from spontaneous expansion favoured by rural and agricultural abandonment, especially in mountain areas.

It is obvious that climate change is exacerbating the severity of fires, but it is not responsible to wait for emissions to fall and, decades later, for the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) to be the sole and exclusive solution to the problem, given that we would be talking about excessive time scales and, moreover, with the climate of a few decades ago, with the continuity and fuel load of today, we would have had considerable problems controlling fires anyway. What fires and floods do in climatic conditions such as those we are currently experiencing is to highlight even more starkly that we have not done our homework, and it is therefore tremendously irresponsible to place all our trust in a vague global fight against climate change.

There is no alternative but to build landscapes — including the entire territory, except for fully urbanised areas and bodies of water — that are truly resilient to fires. To achieve this, the biomass load must be kept at levels that can be managed by firefighting services (10 t/ha of dead fine plant material), together with the necessary horizontal discontinuity of vegetation and sufficient accessibility to enable firefighting personnel to work in safe conditions. This requires reversing rural abandonment, fighting for extensive agriculture and livestock farming, overcoming static, Edenist conservationism, increasing demand for locally sourced materials and food (cork, biomass, honey, game meat, esparto grass, wood, etc.) and integrating prescribed burning as a vaccine that allows the territory to overcome the challenge of fire without it becoming a catastrophe.

This would also reduce water loss due to excessive interception by the population, easily averaging around 500 m³/ha per year, and, just as importantly, it would deactivate the process of population concentration in increasingly saturated cities and coastal areas.