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 develop into bald and rocky. Areas the place forests do resprout are sometimes reburned. Fowl music has vanished with the bushes.
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 is just not alone. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC) has highlighted the Mediterranean area as a ‘international local weather hotspot’, with a rise in floor temperatures of 1.5 levels Celsius from pre-industrial ranges already driving an elevated danger 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 wish to replant bushes to revive root methods and to get well misplaced carbon sinks. Others say forests and hearth zones don’t combine.
To this point, there isn’t any clear proof of which facet is appropriate, and native elements decide what’s greatest, the 4 specialists mentioned. 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,” mentioned Camille Stevens-Rumann, affiliate professor of fireplace ecology at Colorado State College. “Individuals typically need locations to appear to be how they did earlier than, however which may not be appropriate in a brand new hearth regime.”
Greece desires its forests again. With the assistance of €450 million from the EU, the federal government has adopted a nationwide hearth prevention plan that additionally consists of planting 1 million bushes in Attica.
“The rise of greenery and its preservation is just not solely a objective of the federal government however of all the 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 is just not 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 outdoors Athens blackened by final month’s hearth.
Subsequent yr, he mentioned, the bottom there, already baking in summer season, will likely be even hotter for the shortage of shade. The lack of tree root methods will make the soil looser, growing the chance of floods or landslides, he mentioned. There will likely be extra mud.
Much less flammable vegetation like some sorts of grasses or agricultural land is the reply, not bushes, he mentioned.
“We’ve to noticeably deal with the way to restore the panorama, not simply planting bushes and forests, however in a manner that will likely be…extra resilient towards pure disasters.”
Fernando Pulido, professor of forestry science on the College of Extremadura in Spain, advisable planting crops or creating different limitations between dense forests within the Mediterranean area.
“This entails a change in mentality … nevertheless it’s the one option to assure that there will not be one other hearth on the similar place after eight or 10 years,” he mentioned.