As Climate Warms, Fire-Ravaged Sweden Gets a Taste of California
Awildfire sparked, and then another, until more than 50 blazes were burning across the landscape.
This was late July in Sweden, not California.
Familiar foes — blistering temperatures and vegetation dried out by drought — fanned Sweden’s fires from the Arctic Circle to the country’s southern border. The country, which experiences on average three wildfires through July, was soon overwhelmed.
Officials dispatched nearly every municipal firefighter in the nation. They called for aircraft from Italy, Portugal and Norway and personnel from France, Poland and Germany. And soon, they began looking to California, shudderingly, for answers.
What has become normal for the Golden State — neighbourhoods levelled by flames, ash falling like snow, firefighters stretched thin — is increasingly becoming a worldwide phenomenon because of global warming. But the idea of having to respond more like California is daunting.
California doesn’t have the secret to preventing and fighting wildfires, which have brought devastation and death this year to Redding and the forests east of Yosemite. But it has more answers than most places.
“There are a lot of eyes on California when it comes to wildfires because the state has been so severely hit,” said Per Becker, a senior lecturer on risk management and societal safety at Sweden’s Lund University, about 375 miles south of Stockholm.
California, he said, is the “canary bird in the coal mine, being hit earlier than us by changes in the climate system. We can learn a lot from how California deals with wildfires because their situation is much worse.”
What is clear is that the learning curve will be steep.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, has a US$442.8 million (FJ$929.48m) budget and years of experience battling major blazes. Within hours of a big fire erupting, California can marshal a pop-up city of responders coordinating from land and air.
No other state, and few countries, have a force like it — including Sweden, which has been uniquely unprepared for its onslaught.
The country’s firefighters are trained to put out household blazes, not wildland infernos. The government, controversially, doesn’t own a single firefighting aircraft to drop water or retardant.
In late July, officials sent military fighter jets to drop a bomb on a wildfire near the Norwegian border to smother it. They couldn’t control the blaze and saw few other options.
“California has fires all the time,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian and professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.
“They’ve got the apparatus, the big helicopters and big organization. Sweden does not. Most places suddenly facing wildfires do not.”