70% of Catalonia's forest hectares do not have a clearing plan to prevent fires.

GironaForest fires are not only extinguished with water, but also with prevention. Before the summer season, it is essential to have forests, roadsides, and fields in good condition. cleared of weeds, debris and dry wood in order to prevent any small fire, fanned by the wind and high temperatures, from complicating the outreach efforts of firefighters working on the ground with trucks and aerial resources. However, according to 2024 data from the Catalan Forest Observatory (OFC), of the more than 2 million hectares of forested land in Catalonia, only just over 30% have a planning tool that outlines fire prevention actions.

This does not mean that no forest management is carried out in forests without a management plan, but it certainly highlights the large amount of unmaintained wild vegetation throughout the country.

The reason is that clearing all these forests is not easy and generates tensions between private owners, who own 75% of the forested hectares in Catalonia, and the Generalitat (Catalan Government), which, together with local entities, owns the rest.

The Directorate General of Forests, which reports to the Department of Agriculture, works with strategic interventions on public plots at high risk of fire, but, according to the 2018 decree of the state Forestry Law, to intervene on private properties, it needs authorization from the owner in question.

Sources from the regional ministry acknowledge to the ARA that this greatly hinders the work and creates a void in activity, as owners often have abandoned land, on long-inherited plots that they neither visit nor maintain, fragmented with other owners who neglect the property. Without an agreement or user permit, professionals and technicians from the public company Forestal Catalana cannot carry out any brush clearing or firebreak work.

It is not profitable for the owners

However, there are also many other forest landowners who do care for their forests and engage in forestry activities. For these carefully managed properties, the Generalitat (Catalan Government) offers a €3 million grant so the owners can carry out the cleanup themselves. However, the Catalan Forestry Consortium, which brings together some 1,500 members with more than 200,000 hectares, is calling for more aid to be able to carry out forestry activities without losing money.

"Forests aren't profitable because you have to invest in them, and the return is years away, but for society, they have more value than ever because the social use of forests has increased dramatically since the pandemic; people go on hikes to enjoy the views, on bicycles, and buy services from people who look for mushrooms. And so we can have much better managed forests," explains the president of the Consortium, Rosendo Castelló.

The owners also regret that, when they want to make a construction plan for their forest, they need to complete a lot of paperwork and administrative procedures that are sometimes denied due to environmental issues of "excessively protectionist" European regulations, useful for preventing deforestation in protected areas, but which do not take into account the Catalan reality: Likewise, the Consortium prefers to carry out the maintenance tasks themselves, rather than transfer the activity to the Generalitat, adding that they are the first interested in preventing fires, since, if a farm burns down, they are the main victims.

Extensive livestock farming and agrarian mosaic, keys

Among the forest owners, of course, there are also farmers or ranchers who have forests within their farms. This is the case of Àlex Fontaner, a rancher who had 100 hectares in the Figuerassa ravine, in Alfara de Carles, where 140 cows grazed. These cattle have now been completely burned by the fire. Paul's fire. "It's a disaster. Luckily, we were able to get the cattle out as soon as we saw the smoke in the mountains, but there's nothing left," he laments. "The nearest ravine was badly flattened by cows, and that helped stop the fire," he adds.

Along the same lines as the Consorci partners, Fontaner criticizes the fact that, beyond the clearing of the forest for pastures, which is already significant enough, they haven't been able to carry out work in the undergrowth or burn the edges because the administration won't give them permission to do so. "They deny the process without justification, and the Generalitat hasn't asked if workers can be sent either. We won't put up any obstacles; we feel abandoned," he concludes.

Beyond forest management, farmers also contribute to fire prevention, as animal grazing contributes to forest clearing, and crop fields can also act as firebreaks. However, only if they are organized in a mosaic, not in large areas of a single crop, which can be counterproductive, as Raquel Serrat, national coordinator of Unió de Pagesos, argues. "It really helps to have a good agricultural mosaic, with different crops and crops with fruit and olive trees side by side, which act as barriers, not large expanses of cereal monocultures." as happened in Segarra, with the dry wheat ready to be harvested, where the fire advanced at great speed," he explains.

Regarding the risk factor of working in the fields, with machinery at high temperatures that sometimes generates sparks, Serrat concludes: "Every campaign we meet with the Ministries of Agriculture and the Interior and we are open. When a fire starts because of a power line, nobody would say that the power should be cut."