A perfect landscape for wildfires
European Union’s land mass is covered 40 per cent by trees. That means it’s ripe for wildfires
TIVISSA, SPAIN — Forests are getting some high-profile attention lately.
President Donald Trump expressed his support Tuesday night 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 per cent of planet-warming carbon dioxide, they are also extremely vulnerable in the age of climate disruptions.
In a hotter, drier, more flammable climate, like here in the Mediterranean region, forests can die slowly from drought, or they can go up in flames almost instantly, releasing all the carbon stored in their trunks and branches into the atmosphere.
That raises an increasingly urgent question: How best to manage woodlands in a world that 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 per cent of the European Union’s land mass is covered by trees, making it one of the most forestrich 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 per cent 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 here 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 up here. 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, signalled 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 favour of less back-breaking, more profitable ventures, forests came back.
Now Castellnou has been setting some of those forests ablaze, getting rid of the grasses and low-lying shrub so the flames cannot as easily race up to the crowns of the young, frail pines. The last thing he wants his two young children to inherit is a hillside strewn with dry, flammable brush.
His ancestors chose a steep hillside and planted almonds. The grandparents of his wife, Rut Domènech, 39, cultivated hazelnuts. Nearly everyone had olives to supply oil for the year. Some grew grapes to make wine. Every bit of hill was under cultivation.
By the second half of the 20th century, Catalonians had begun abandoning the steepest, hardest-to-farm hillsides in favour of the valleys, where machines and fertilizers made farming easier and more productive.
Farming fell out of favour. The shepherds sold their animals.
Across Europe, between 1950 and 2010, amid rapid postwar reconstruction, woods and grasslands grew by roughly 150,000 square miles.
Farmers in the Montsant wine region of Catalonia now harvest earlier in the season; the heat sweetens the grapes too early, and some worry whether they’ll have to switch to dessert wines.
On an exceptionally hot day last summer, on a poultry farm, a pile of manure caught fire, as mounds of animal waste have done before. But so fierce was the wind that the embers travelled across the hills, causing fires up to 13 miles (21 kilometres) away.
Fire, Castellnou pointed out more than once, is nature’s way of reshaping the landscape for the future. What will come up on these denuded hills will be less homogeneous, he said, and more resilient for a new climate.
He favours what he calls managed burns, getting rid of low brush in order to prevent the next fire from raging out of control. And sometimes, he favours letting fires burn. It’s part of the natural ecology of the forest, he said. The white pines, for instance, reproduce only during fires, when their seed pods explode in the heat.
“Instead of fighting fire, making peace with fire,” Castellnou advised.