A mass migration of Europeans from the countryside to cities in recent decades has left neglected woodland at the mercy of the droughts and heat waves that are increasingly common amid global warming.
Fighting forest fires in Europe has never been so hard. Here’s why:The continent’s so-called rural exodus since the second half of the last century, as Europeans moved to cities in search of a better life, has left significant areas of countryside neglected and vulnerable.
That is especially true in southern Europe, where the increasing occurrence of fire weather conditions — high temperatures, drought and high winds — make summer wildfires “the new norm,” says Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.
By that same date, Europe had witnessed almost 1,900 wildfires compared with an average of 470 for the 2006-2021 period.The droughts and heat waves tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight, as conditions make it easier for them to spread quickly. Scientists say climate change will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.
“This is not an act of god,” Otto says of the more frequent wildfires. “This is, to a large degree, our doing and we have quite a lot of to do something about it.”
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