Lebanon warned wildfire threat will increase
▶ Climate change and population shift could mean well-fuelled blazes in places once untouched by the menace
Lebanon faces a growing risk of high-casualty wildfires like those that killed dozens in Greece last month, experts said yesterday, as firefighters battled a three-day blaze in the north of the country.
Authorities doused 14-metre-high flames from helicopters in an effort to extinguish fires that swept across a large area of pine forest in the Akkar region. By yesterday morning, 80 per cent of the fire was under control, officials said.
“This is a very difficult fire due to its location,” a civil defence spokesman told The National.
“There are no roads that our trucks can use to get to it.”
While wildfires are common in Lebanon during the summer months, a lack of forest management and climate change are allowing fires to spread to areas they have not reached before, and burn for longer.
“This fire burning now is reaching areas that have rarely been affected, such as areas covered by fir trees, which are very low density and don’t burn as easily,” said George Mitri, director of the Land and Natural Resources programme at the University of Balamand in Lebanon.
“We have also recently seen fires burning at higher elevations.”
Mr Mitri, an expert on wildfires, said the unusual forest fires in Lebanon this year could put lives at risk in a way that they have not before.
“We should be worried. If we don’t take the right measures we could be facing more disastrous fires that affect not only forests, but people too,” he said.
“We have many villages located in very high risk areas, and a lot of new residential projects being built in densely vegetated areas. They are vulnerable. What happened in Greece can happen in Lebanon.”
The biggest cause of wildfires in Lebanon is negligence. This is usually a farmer burning agricultural waste or a campfire left to burn. But there are longterm, underlying factors that create the conditions for the fires to spread more easily.
The movement of people from rural areas to cities and towns over the past few decades has changed Lebanon’s forests dramatically.
Where they were once pruned for firewood and grazed by animals, they have been left to grow more dense, creating a more favourable environment for fires to spread. The same has happened to agricultural land.
Climate change is also playing a part. In Lebanon, there has been an increase in the minimum temperature over the winter, said Nadim Farajalla, director of the Climate
Change and Environment programme at the American University of Beirut.
“Precipitation has been pretty constant in Lebanon for the past 60 years. But the minimum temperature has been on the rise,” Mr Farajalla told The National.
“You get less snow, which melts quicker, which means drier soil and drier conditions, which lends itself to conditions that can make fires worse.”
A 2014 study by Mr Mitri found that based on the country’s predicted climatic changes, “Lebanon is expected to face an increasing risk of fire occurrence”.
“We still need more research but an increase in temperature and decrease in precipitation is closely linked to the size and number and extent of fires,” he said.
The same is true elsewhere. This year there have been record-breaking fires across the northern hemisphere. In Europe, soaring temperatures led to the largest fire in Sweden in decades, affecting more than 30,000 hectares of forest.
Latvia, Portugal and Finland have all suffered major blazes this summer. Thousands of firefighters in California are battling the biggest wildfire in the state’s history.
The fires that ravaged Greece last month left 91 people dead, making it one of the worst wildfire disasters in the country’s history. Dry weather and high winds helped the fires to spread, together with a poor response from authorities.
The Greek government’s mismanagement of the fires caused widespread anger and led to the relatives of two people killed in the blaze to file a lawsuit against officials.
Mr Mitri said action was needed in Lebanon to prevent wildfires threatening lives.
“Our forests will have more dry fuel and this will trigger a larger number of uncontrollable fires,” he said.
“We always say that firefighting happens before a fire occurs, not as a reaction.”