PLANT MORE TREES?
Wildfires have drastically altered Attica’s panorama, satellite tv for pc photographs present. Hillsides, forested a couple of years in the past, have turn out to be bald and rocky. Areas the place forests do resprout are sometimes reburned. Chicken music has vanished with the bushes.
Information from International Forest Watch, an initiative that makes use of satellites to trace deforestation, reveals that of all of the fire-related forest loss in Attica since 2000, 74 per cent has occurred since 2017.
Greece isn’t alone. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC) has highlighted the Mediterranean area as a ‘world local weather hotspot’, with a rise in floor temperatures of 1.5 levels Celsius from pre-industrial ranges already driving an elevated threat of wildfires and drought.
Wildfires are additionally a rising menace in the USA, Canada, Australia, and even the wet United Kingdom. With that menace has come a debate about what to do with a forest as soon as it has burned.
Some wish to replant bushes to revive root techniques and to recuperate misplaced carbon sinks. Others say forests and fireplace zones don’t combine.
To this point, there isn’t any clear proof of which aspect is appropriate, and native components decide what’s finest, the 4 specialists mentioned. Nonetheless, some say a rethink is required, particularly in areas the place the identical areas are being repeatedly burned.
“There is no such thing as a nice consensus on what to do,” mentioned Camille Stevens-Rumann, affiliate professor of fireplace ecology at Colorado State College. “Individuals usually need locations to appear like how they did earlier than, however which may not be appropriate in a brand new fireplace regime.”
Greece needs its forests again. With the assistance of €450 million from the EU, the federal government has adopted a nationwide fireplace prevention plan that additionally consists of planting 1 million bushes in Attica.
“The rise of greenery and its preservation isn’t solely a purpose of the federal government however of your entire European Union,” mentioned Efstathios Stathopoulos, Greece’s Basic Secretary of Forestry.
The EU has a plan to replant 3 billion bushes throughout the bloc by 2030, though the plan isn’t targeted on replanting after fires.
Not everybody thinks resowing forests after fires works.
Theodore Giannaros, a fireplace meteorologist on the Nationwide Observatory of Athens, surveilled a hillside exterior Athens blackened by final month’s fireplace.
Subsequent 12 months, he mentioned, the bottom there, already baking in summer season, can be even hotter for the dearth of shade. The lack of tree root techniques will make the soil looser, growing the chance of floods or landslides, he mentioned. There can be extra mud.
Much less flammable vegetation like some sorts of grasses or agricultural land is the reply, not bushes, he mentioned.
“We now have to noticeably concentrate on restore the panorama, not simply planting bushes and forests, however in a manner that can be…extra resilient in opposition to pure disasters.”
Fernando Pulido, professor of forestry science on the College of Extremadura in Spain, advisable planting crops or creating different boundaries between dense forests within the Mediterranean area.
“This entails a change in mentality … however it’s the one method to assure that there will not be one other fireplace on the similar place after eight or 10 years,” he mentioned.
