PLANT MORE TREES?
Wildfires have drastically altered Attica’s panorama, satellite tv for pc photos present. Hillsides, forested just a few years in the past, have turn into bald and rocky. Areas the place forests do resprout are sometimes reburned. Fowl tune has vanished with the timber.
Information from International Forest Watch, an initiative that makes use of satellites to trace deforestation, exhibits that of all of the fire-related forest loss in Attica since 2000, 74 per cent has occurred since 2017.
Greece will not be 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 US, 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 need to replant timber to revive root programs and to recuperate misplaced carbon sinks. Others say forests and fireplace zones don’t combine.
Up to now, there isn’t a clear proof of which facet is right, and native components decide what’s greatest, the 4 consultants stated. Nonetheless, some say a rethink is required, particularly in areas the place the identical areas are being repeatedly burned.
“There isn’t any nice consensus on what to do,” stated Camille Stevens-Rumann, affiliate professor of fireside ecology at Colorado State College. “Individuals typically need locations to appear like how they did earlier than, however that 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 contains planting 1 million timber in Attica.
“The rise of greenery and its preservation will not be solely a purpose of the federal government however of the whole European Union,” stated Efstathios Stathopoulos, Greece’s Normal Secretary of Forestry.
The EU has a plan to replant 3 billion timber throughout the bloc by 2030, though the plan will not be centered 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 outdoors Athens blackened by final month’s fireplace.
Subsequent yr, he stated, the bottom there, already baking in summer season, might be even hotter for the dearth of shade. The lack of tree root programs will make the soil looser, growing the chance of floods or landslides, he stated. There might be extra mud.
Much less flammable vegetation like some sorts of grasses or agricultural land is the reply, not timber, he stated.
“We’ve got to noticeably give attention to tips on how to restore the panorama, not simply planting timber and forests, however in a manner that might be…extra resilient towards pure disasters.”
Fernando Pulido, professor of forestry science on the College of Extremadura in Spain, really useful planting crops or creating different limitations between dense forests within the Mediterranean area.
“This entails a change in mentality … however it’s the one option to assure that there will not be one other fireplace on the identical place after eight or 10 years,” he stated.