Reacción a "So far this year, almost 120,000 hectares have been destroyed by fire in Spain – one of the highest figures recorded for this time of year"

July isn’t even over yet and almost 120,000 hectares have already been ravaged by fire in Spain. Did you expect a summer like this?

“Unfortunately, summers like this are becoming increasingly predictable. Short-term factors, such as a rainy spring, are combined with long-term factors. The latter include changes in land use, which have led to a significant build-up of vegetation across the landscape, and climate change, which results in higher temperatures and more extreme weather events. With regard to the climate, a recent study estimated that the weather conditions that fuelled last summer’s severe fires were previously expected to occur once every few centuries, but could now happen every 15 years.”

What has gone wrong with prevention?

“Many things are going wrong, but above all, there is a lack of forest management. This can be addressed by increasing investment in forest management, but sometimes it doesn’t take much money to reduce risks. For example, little progress has been made in the use of prescribed burning, a viable and relatively inexpensive tool for reducing the amount of accumulated vegetation and creating breaks in the landscape. If there is a lot of fuel, when a fire breaks out it can quickly reach an intensity and scale that are difficult to control. Carrying out small, planned burns during low-risk periods can help prevent much more dangerous fires.”

What is your forecast for the rest of the summer?

‘The outlook for the rest of the summer is not good, because the vegetation is already very dry and there is still a good part of the summer to go. If high temperatures and low humidity coincide again, the risk of further major fires will be high, as we have landscapes with a high structural risk (that amount of fuel and its continuity that I mentioned earlier, as well as a high concentration of villages and homes in areas of some risk).’