The challenge of fires in full climate change

BarcelonaWe have barely started July and Catalonia has already experienced two intense heat episodes (the second will last until Wednesday), which has turned the forest mass into a powder keg. In this context, fires like the one in La Bisbal d'Empordà, which threatens the entire protected area of Les Gavarres and has forced several towns in Empordà to be confined, are, unfortunately, part of a new normal that must be faced. Whether the origin was work with an angle grinder or any other human activity is not the important thing, as accidents can always happen, but rather how we can manage the territory in times of climate change to prevent these new generation fires from ravaging natural landscapes and endangering human lives.

A little less than a year ago ARA interviewed the chief inspector of the Forest Action Reinforcement Group (GRAF), Marc Castellnou, one of the world's leading fire experts. Castellnou already warned us then that before, "we had a powerful extinguishing system that could control fires until the atmosphere began to change" due to climate change. And that therefore, now the extinguishing system is no longer as important as land management. In this regard, and given what we are seeing in Empordà, his words are prophetic: "The country has allowed territorial structures assuming that the extinguishing system was sufficient to protect it. But climate change has shown that it is not enough".

Faced with this new reality, then, a total paradigm shift is imposed, in which territorial planning must take precedence over any other consideration. And this, in a territory with irregular orography and many forests like Catalonia, with private property playing a predominant role, is not at all easy to manage. But we must assume that abandoned fields that are now forest mass will hardly be cultivated again and, therefore, what is needed is to allocate resources, both public and private, to minimize the danger posed by these new generation fires, which are literally impossible to extinguish at first because they exceed all the capabilities of the Firefighters.

The proliferation of developments and scattered houses should also be addressed in this new context. We all have in mind the images of megafires like the one in California or Greece last year, which destroyed entire urban areas. Just as disasters like the Valencia 'dana' have led to rethinking urban planning in flood-prone areas, fires should be a key variable. In this regard, Castellnou warned of the danger posed by having a wooded area like Collserola in the middle of the metropolitan area of Barcelona.

Now we must concentrate all efforts on extinguishing the Gavarres fire. But the next day, we will have to sit down with experts and get to work to manage a problem that we now know will be recurrent in the future.