(FT) How a rural exodus stoked Europe’s deadly wildfires

Interessante artigo publicado pelo Financial Times sobre a causa principal dos fogos em Portugal: a desertificação do interior. A ler.

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(FT) How a rural exodus stoked Europe’s deadly wildfires

Movement of farm workers to cities in recent decades has created vast areas of flammable brush on abandoned land

The deadly wildfires raging across Europe this summer were supercharged by a long pattern of depopulation that has hollowed out the continent’s rural communities. 

Record-breaking heatwaves linked to climate change drove the fires that have killed residents and firefighters from Spain to Turkey, but ministers and experts say the blazes were especially destructive because they spread unobstructed across abandoned farmland.

Decades of migration from rural villages to urban areas by people seeking work have turned vast expanses of former farmland into highly flammable wild vegetation. About 20 people were killed by fires in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus in June and July, followed by at least eight deaths in Spain and Portugal this month.

“As rural areas empty, abandoned land fuels wildfires,” said Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, director at the OECD’s Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, which has warned about the harms of rural decline. “The answer lies in pairing strong prevention and fire-response measures with efforts to revitalise and sustain rural economies.” 

Cities such as Los Angeles have suffered wildfire damage exacerbated by a parallel trend: city residents searching for more space have driven a sprawl of new housebuilding in fire-prone semi-rural areas.

“Here it’s the opposite,” said Víctor Fernández García, an expert in forestry and farming at the University of León in one of the worst-affected Spanish regions. “The brushland and the forests are invading the villages.”

In north-west Spain, firefighters struggled to control a blaze this month, while transport links were severed and thousands of people were evacuated as an area more than twice the size of metropolitan London burned.

By Thursday, 402,000 hectares had been scorched as fires still raged — the largest area of damage in Spain since 1994, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Spanish energy and environment minister Sara Aagesen said it was vital to reverse the trend of “rural abandonment” and step up efforts to reduce the “fuel load” of unmanaged vegetation through pruning, brush clearing and renewed grazing.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has said the catastrophe is proof that “the climate emergency is progressing at an ever faster pace”. His ministers have drawn a direct link between the fires and the most intense heatwave since records began in 1975, in which temperatures surged above 40C at an average of 4.6C above the seasonal norm.

Earlier in the year, unusually heavy rains had sated a drought but also created a burst of lush, combustible vegetation.

A study by World Weather Attribution found climate change made the June and July wildfires in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus 10 times more likely.

Sánchez has called for a cross-party pact to deal with climate change, but was rebuffed by the People’s party (PP), the conservative opposition. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo was ridiculed for suggesting that Spain set up a national database of “pyromaniac” arsonists and track them with ankle tags.

In Portugal, the area affected is half the size of the territory burned by devastating fires in 2017, which killed more than 60 people. Spain and Portugal combined account for two-thirds of all the land ravaged by fire in Europe this year, according to the EFFIS.

The decline of rural agriculture has exposed many villages that used to be protected by animal enclosures, grazing plots and vegetable patches, which acted as firebreaks, said Fernández García.

In Spain’s León province, the number of sheep and goat farms dropped from almost 34,000 in 1962 to just over 1,000 in 2020. “The villages were not in such danger back then,” he said.

The OECD warned last year that a similar pattern was stoking fires in Greece. “This is not just Spain’s problem but a European one,” said Kamal-Chaoui.

While depopulation has reduced the number of people threatened by fire in shrunken villages, it has also created communities of mostly elderly people who are more vulnerable.

In Molezuelas de la Carballeda, a fire-menaced village in Zamora, Spain, the population has fallen by almost half to 47 in the past decade and the average age of residents is 70. Mayor Alexandre Satue Lobo said it had been “a little complicated” to evacuate those who were in wheelchairs or housebound for other reasons.

Francisco Martín Azcárate, an ecology professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, said the policy response should include the regular removal of scrub through controlled fires, whose use has been limited by restrictive regulations.

“It’s impossible for there to be no fires. There always have been fires, and there always will be,” he said.

“But we’ve gone from very frequent but small fires, which didn’t cause major problems, to fires that are vast and very intense. Mega-fires with extremely high temperatures and the capacity to spread across tens of thousands of hectares, which are practically impossible to fight with the resources we have.”

On top of the unmanaged spread of brush, Martín Azcárate said a now fading vogue for planting new forests had increased the volume of potential fuel for fires. He argued that towns and villages should be protected by clearing perimeters around them with little or no vegetation.

In Portugal, José Pereira, a researcher at the country’s Forest Research Centre, said reviving pastoral herding was one way to re-diversify rural land use. Although pastoralism declined due to dwindling profits, Portugal has launched modest experiments with public funds to try to make it work again.

“It is to a very large extent a rural development problem,” Pereira said. “How do we try to maintain a local population that constitutes a minimal labour force capable of managing the land?”