{"id":73018,"date":"2022-07-22T10:35:15","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T14:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.carilec.org\/?p=73018"},"modified":"2022-07-22T10:35:15","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T14:35:15","slug":"europe-wildfires-are-they-linked-to-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/europe-wildfires-are-they-linked-to-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe wildfires: Are they linked to climate change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jake Horton & Daniele Palumbo<\/strong>
\nBBC Reality Check<\/p>\n

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Heatwaves and wildfires across Europe are causing alarm – with warnings some countries could be in for their worst fire seasons so far.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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So how do wildfires compare with previous years?<\/p>\n

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So far this year, the amount of land burnt by fires across the European Union is more than three times greater than what you would expect by the middle of July.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Almost 346,000 hectares (1,370 sq miles) of land have been recorded as burnt (as of 16 July),\u00a0according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS)<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Much of Western Europe has been hit by a record-breaking heatwave, which substantially increases the risk of fires.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“There are basically three important ingredients for fires – high temperatures, dryness, and high wind,” says Dr Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.<\/p>\n

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What is the overall trend?<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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This fire season is something of an outlier, according to experts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“We’ve actually seen a decline in the area burned by fires in the Mediterranean and across Europe more widely over the last couple of decades, in a way that doesn’t marry up with the rapidly changing risk of fires,” says Dr Matthew Jones, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It is a complex picture, experts say, and hard to pick one reason for this trend for the whole of Europe.<\/p>\n

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Over 95% of the fires in Europe are caused by human activity,\u00a0according to the EFFIS<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And some places fires are becoming more expected, such as throughout the Mediterranean, are seeing better safeguards and awareness campaigns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“People are more aware than ever of the risks of wildfire – and that’s leading to fewer wildfire ignitions and improvements in the way we fireproof the landscape,” Dr Jones says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“Yet, when we get really extreme droughts and heatwaves like the current one, we get huge fire years that puncture through the long-term trend.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Which countries have been worst hit this year?<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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France and Spain have had a big jump in the amount of land burnt by forest fires so far this season.<\/p>\n

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Both countries have recorded about seven times more land burnt through to the middle of July compared with average.<\/p>\n

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North-western Spain has seen some of the country’s worst fires this week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Neighbouring Portugal has also seen significant fires, with three times more land burned than normal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The worst of France’s fires have been in the south-western Gironde region, where two engulfed more than 20,000 hectares in the past week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy have also seen a big increase in land burned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Unseasonably hot weather and low rainfall have dried out large areas of forest and grassland across much of Europe, creating good conditions for wildfires to spread.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As you can see in this map of the UK and France, much of the land has been dried out to a shade of brown compared with the green landscape of last year.<\/p>\n

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The UK has also seen an unusually large amount of land burnt by fires so far this year, over four times more than the seasonal average.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Are fires linked to climate change?<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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“Heatwaves and droughts are exacerbated by climate change and are absolutely the defining factor in years with massive wildfire outbreaks, like the present one,” Dr Jones says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But he says other factors such as forest management can affect the likelihood of fires in years with more typical weather.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In high-risk areas of Europe, authorities are increasingly burning down some vegetation, under carefully managed conditions, to make it harder for wildfires to spread.<\/p>\n

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Planes were used to drop water on fires in north-west France<\/p><\/div>\n

There also needs to be better water management to tackle drought conditions, according to some experts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“In many parts of Europe, you have lots of small rivers, swamps and flood plains which have been drained out, which increase the dryness of the forest,” Dr Otto says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“But we definitely see trends in fire weather risk because of climate change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“The risk is higher in the Mediterranean region than the rest of Europe.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Studies\u00a0show increasing fire risk<\/a>\u00a0for central and southern regions of Europe over the past couple of decades.<\/p>\n

SOURCE:\"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jake Horton & Daniele Palumbo BBC Reality Check Heatwaves and wildfires across Europe are causing alarm – with warnings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/wp-includes\/images\/media\/default.svg","month_date":"Jul","day_date":"22","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}