#Europe #firing #worse #Monitor
The wildfires that have ravaged much of Europe in recent weeks have already burned a larger area of land than was lost to flames in all of 2021, the EU’s satellite monitoring service said on Thursday.
Across the European Union this year, as of July 16, fires have burned 517,881 hectares – just over 5,000 km2, or the equivalent area of Trinidad and Tobago, the EFFIS monitor said.
Throughout 2021, 470,359 hectares (4,700 km2) of forest was lost to fires, mostly in Italy and Greece.
In 2022, fires raged in France, Spain, Portugal and Greece amid a record-breaking heatwave that also sparked fires in Britain, where temperatures topped 40C for the first time on record.
EFFIS said Europe could end 2022 with more area burned than 2017, currently the worst year on record for wildfires with almost 1,000,000 hectares (10,000 km2) lost.
“The situation is much worse than expected, even though we expected temperature anomalies in our long-term forecasts,” Jesus San Miguel, EFFIS coordinator, told AFP.
“We expect worse to come – we’re not even halfway through fire season.”
Almost 40,000 hectares of forest in France have been lost to fires so far this year, more than the 30,000 that burned there in 2021.
In Spain – where more than 500 people died this month during a 10-day heatwave – 190,000 hectares have gone up in smoke this year, compared to 85,000 last year.
And with higher temperatures brought on by global warming, places less used to wildfires have also been hit this year, particularly the UK.
Just over 20,000 hectares burned in 2022, compared to just 6,000 in all of 2021.
“In the end, fires are man-made, but the heatwave is critical and (these fires) are clearly linked to climate change,” San Miguel said.
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