With around 500,000 hectares (ha) of forest burnt since the beginning of the year, 2021 is already the second worst year for forest fires in the European Union, after 2017, the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's in-house scientific service, warned on Friday 29 October in the 21st edition of its annual report on forest fires.
According to the document, 61% of the forests burnt in 2021 will take years to recover and about 25% were part of protected sites in the European Natura 2000 network.
For 2020 - the year for which the JRC has complete data - forest fires of more than 30 ha affected 20 EU Member States, burning a total of 339,489 ha, an area slightly larger than that recorded in 2019.
The most affected Member States were Romania, followed by Portugal, Spain and Italy.
Of these 340,000 ha, about 40% (136,331 ha) were Natura 2000 areas.
Commenting on the report, the European Commissioner responsible for the JRC, Mariya Gabriel, pointed to climate change as “increasing the risk and scale of forest fires”.
In addition to increasing the risk of fires, climate change is leading to longer periods of seasonal fires and more fast-spreading “megafires”, which are more difficult to fight, the Commission said.
Access the report: https://bit.ly/3nH7ust (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)