How Europe turned is now perfect landscape wildfires
TIVISSA, Spain — Forests are getting some high-profile attention lately.
President Donald Trump expressed his support last week for a global effort to plant 1 trillion trees, which itself was announced at a gathering of business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, in January. A trillion trees, it was said at that meeting of the World Economic Forum, would go a long way in addressing climate change.
But while trees — and particularly forests full of trees — are vital for swallowing up and storing carbon, and currently absorb 30% of planet-warming carbon dioxide, they are also extremely vulnerable in the age of climate disruptions.
In a hotter, drier, more flammable climate, like in the Mediterranean region, forests can die slowly from drought, or they can go up in flames almost instantly, releasing all the stored carbon into the atmosphere.
That raises an increasingly urgent question: How best to manage woodlands in a world humans have so profoundly altered? “We need to decide what will be the climate-change forest for the future,” is how Kirsten Thonicke, a fire ecologist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, framed the challenge.
A forest revival in Europe is forcing that discussion now.
Today roughly 40% of the European Union’s landmass is covered by trees, making it one of the most forest-rich regions in the world. It’s also ripe for wildfire.
In 2019, intense heat and drought helped spread fires across roughly 1,300 square miles on the Continent, a swath of scorched land 15% bigger than the decade’s annual average, according to preliminary data issued in mid-January by the European Forest Fire Information System.
Marc Castellnou, a 47-year-old fire analyst with the Catalonian fire services, has seen that shift firsthand in the hot, dry hills of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, where his family has lived for generations in a medieval village overlooking the Ebro River.
His mother’s family grew almonds there. The terraces they once hacked into these hard rocks still remain, along with the brick oven of the old farmhouse and a row of juniper trees, which, by local custom, signaled to anyone walking up from the coast that they could barter their fish for bread there.
The almond orchard has long been abandoned. In its place, a scrubby forest of short oaks and white pines has come up. Where goats once grazed, there is now a carpet of dry grass. A perfect landscape for fire.
What happened with his ancestors’ farm has played out across Europe, profoundly altering the countryside over the past half century. As farmers walked away from the land in favor of less backbreaking, more profitable ventures, forests came back.
Now Castellnou has been setting some of those forests ablaze, getting rid of the grasses and lowlying shrub so the flames cannot as easily race up to the crowns of the young, frail pines.
“Climate change is changing everything,” Castellnou said. “We’re trying to build some vaccination into the landscape.”
In Europe last year, wildfires raged as far north as Sweden. Drought and beetle infestations killed swaths of forests in Germany,