Wildfires are becoming harder to deal with, he says, because the soil is not actively controlled with vegetation thinning and deliberate burns. “The problem is that we as a society only have responded to a problem, building fire-fighting capacity, ”says Castellnou. “We have not built ecosystem management.”
The demographic changes and migration towards the city are happening in parallel with climate change. A Mediterranean climate – both in the region around the Mediterranean and similar places as California – is already exposed to wildfires. Rainy winters and springs promote the growth of plants, which dry out in the dry summer and become fuel. Climate change has made these conditions drier – and warmer – for a long time. “It’s a performance enhancer,” Pyne says. “We are seeing climate change magnify these conditions.”
“What’s really interesting, though,” Pyne adds, “is watching the fire begin to move into Central Europe.” This is a more temperate region and has historically not had the regimental wet-dry cycle in the Mediterranean. But now that it is suffering from increasingly extreme heat waves, forest fires can feed conditions that change every hour during these hot events, though the region has not already been stuck in a years-long drought, as California has done.
If a hot, dry wind whips through, it can quickly suck the moisture out of grasses, twigs and shrubs – the really flammable things. The large trees may retain their moisture and resist burning, but the rest of the vegetation is now lit. “You do not have to dry out the landscape to the point where it is all peaks, ”says Pyne. “All you have to do is have enough to carry the fine fuels, and then you can have very fast, hot fires as a result.”
As a result, Europe’s “fire regime”, as scientists call it, is changing: the hotter it gets, the more fire behavior changes. As the dryness of the vegetation increases, the amount of energy it releases when it burns increases. “So the power of fire increases dramatically with the lack of water, and these fires will spread faster,” says Guillermo Rein, who studies fire at Imperial College London. “Some of these fires are actually literally impossible to stop.”
Fire researchers say the best way to reduce the risk is to thin out excess vegetation and make more controlled burns. But Rein points out that this could be a tough sale to the public. “I’m from Spain – I grew up and I grew up in a world where absolutely every brand is wrong,” he says. Some people protest against the smoke, which can aggravate respiratory diseases such as asthma. But the alternative is increasingly massive, out of control fires that burp even more smoke and suffocate communities for days. And firefighters are very careful to make controlled burns on days when conditions do not send the smoke towards people.
Arguing against fewer flames can seem counterintuitive. But the solution is more controlled, beneficial ignitions – literally fighting fire with fire. “Unfortunately, the actual limiting step is not having enough people to perform the prescribed burning,” Rein says. “There are not enough people who support concept of prescribed incineration. ”