wildfires

The fire that originated on August 15 between the Tenerife municipalities of Arafo and Candelaria, in the northeast of the island, is advancing on several fronts and has affected more than 13,000 hectares, although the firefighting services have stabilized it in some points. The people evacuated in the last days have been thousands. As confirmed by the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, the fire has been caused.

Rising temperatures, droughts, heat waves and abundant untreated material in forests are the perfect cocktail for fires to break out. When they are beyond the control of firefighting services - because of their intensity, speed and unpredictability - we speak of mega-fires or sixth generation wildfires, a phenomenon that is not new but whose frequency could increase due to rural abandonment and climate change. Some experts have thus described the fire in Tenerife that began on August 15 and has forced the evacuation or confinement of thousands of people.

The fires in Hawaii, which have left at least a hundred dead and hundreds missing, have devastated entire towns and villages and have put the issue of how to prevent such intense fires back on the table. World Wildfire Prevention Day is celebrated this Friday 18 August. The increase in the occurrence and recurrence of large wildfires jeopardizes the resilience of socio-ecological systems. Efforts in prevention must be a priority and constant throughout the year. We have a joint responsibility as a society to face this unprecedented problem, which will worsen in the coming years.

How to tackle the remaining forest fires? The author proposes that long-term policy measures are needed that go beyond reactive firefighting, which can aggravate the problem.

We are finding fires that exceed the maximum extinguishing capacity of the resources that are being asked to control them by 4 or 5 times, which is nonsense, as well as recklessness. We should ask ourselves about our territorial, social and economic model for dealing with this situation so that we do not leave the fire-fighting services with this intractable and unsolvable problem.

Our landscapes urgently need proactive, adaptive, integrative management to enable rural development that is compatible in the medium and long term with biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is clear that unilateral and reactive management in the face of the challenges of global change is neither effective nor intelligent. And inaction is also a decision.

Coinciding with the heat wave, numerous wildfires have started and spread in the Iberian Peninsula, with two fatalities in the province of Zamora.