Wildfires
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
If you’re living in Europe like me, your writer, you might be thinking that wildfires are getting worse. After a little investigation of our own, we discovered this might not be true. Going to the experts revealed that the area burned by wildfires is declining, but that is…
the symptom of a new problem.
On a global scale, wildfires are in decline; in fact, a steep decline in the last few years. Some of that is due to better forest protection, like in the Amazon. Zooming in from the global scale, we see a few facts that need to be taken into consideration.
Most wildfires are in Africa; zooming in, in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), mostly caused by burning rainforest for agriculture. Terrible, yes, but for the scope of this article, we will filter out burning land for agriculture.
Africa is the graph on the top left, with a significantly higher annual wildfire area than the rest of the world (see continent graphs, below).
What is happening?
The fact that Western media is covering wildfires much more is because Western media is biased towards Western events. This makes it seem that wildfires are getting worse while studies are showing that wildfires are lessening in severity, and are on the move.
We again disregard any data that comes from burning off land for industrial agriculture.
The sharp decline in wildfires in mainly Africa is due to the fact that burned savanna land is unable to recover from the wildfires. Desertification is happening in these areas, obviously because of the droughts, not so obviously because of the torrential rains that wash away fertile soil. With the savanna unable to recover there is nothing to burn and so wildfires eventually cease in these areas. This is causing the rapid decline in wildfires in Africa, which account for a huge part of global wildfire burn areas.
Due to global warming the wildfires are on the move to colder areas, meaning they move away from the equator, towards the poles, and wildfires are occurring at higher elevations (up mountains so to speak). And larger vegetation species are affected by drought, whereas savanna mainly consists of grass species; even trees are now drying out. This means that instead of savannas, it is now northern (boreal) forests that are burning in wildfires, with huge parts of boreal forests already burning in Canada and Russia. And even these forests are struggling to recover in some areas.
Research makes clear that:
“For central Spain, the scientists found that the intense heat and dryness in July had roughly a 17% probability of occurring in a given year in the present-day climate. In the preindustrial world, however, the likelihood of such conditions would have been 0.85%, the researchers estimated.”
On the one hand, wildfires are decreasing in already burned savanna in Africa. On the other hand, as the climate crisis intensifies, it is easily possible that the annual burned area from wildfires will increase again as boreal forests become increasingly more vulnerable to wildfires.
Who is responsible?
Wildfires can start for different reasons: a lightning strike, a campfire, weapons firing, a piece of glass, arson, etc. The wildfires we see today can only spread this fast and this big due to global warming; in a healthy ecosystem the vegetation retains enough moisture to slow or even stop a wildfire from spreading. The two main industries responsible for global warming are the fossil fuel industry (Shell, Exxon, BP… the list is really too long) and industrial agriculture, the latter responsible for the “controlled burns” to burn off large pieces of forest for agriculture and commodity crops, with its CO2 emissions (among other emissions and use of toxins).
What to do?
Help us put a stop to the fossil fuel industry, the alternatives are already here. Join Fridays For Future and demand climate justice for yourself and generations to come!
Try a meat free diet. It takes the most resources to produce food from cattle, on average:
25kg of feed for 1 kg of beef
15kg of feed for 1 kg of lamb
6.4kg of feed for 1 kg of pork
3.3kg of feed for 1 kg of chicken
Collect water run-off. With a small effort you can collect water run-off from your roof or garden into a barrel, and let that water seep into the ground through a pipe at the bottom of the barrel.
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