Europe’s Destructive Wildfires Equivalent to One-Fifth of Belgium in Size

TOPSHOT - Firefighters operate at the site of a wildfire in Pumarejo de Tera near Zamora, northern Spain, on June 18, 2022. - Firefighters continued to fight against multiple fires in Spain, one of which ravaged nearly 20,000 hectares of land, on the last day of an extreme heat wave which crushed the country, with peaks at 43 degrees. The largest of these forest fires was still out of control this afternoon in the Sierra de la Culebra, a mountain range in the region of Castile and Leon (northwest), near the border with Portugal.
(Photo : Photo by CESAR MANSO/AFP via Getty Images)

The year's record-breaking heat and extreme drought had brought waves of destructive fires across Europe - most than any other year since 2006. In fact, it doubled the 2006-2021 average.

According to The Guardian, the continent now burned an area equivalent to one-fifth of Belgium, supported by data from the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis) which calculated 659,541 hectares (1.6m acres) of land burned across the continent between January and mid-August - 56% higher than the previous record in 2017 which reached 988,087.

Due to successive heatwaves and historic drought, the continent is driven towards what experts say "a record year for wildfire destruction". With the ongoing trends, experts believe that more than 1m hectare could be lost to wildfires this year.

"The situation in terms of drought and extremely high temperatures has affected all Europe this year and the overall situation in the region is worrying, while we are still in the middle of the fire season," said the Effis coordinator, Jesús San-Miguel.

Four Times the Historical Average

While fire seasons in Europe are historically "driven mainly by countries in the Mediterranean region", fires have been blazing in central and northern countries that "normally do not experience fires in their territory" since 2010, San-Miguel said.

This year's blaze surpasses any other wildfires across the EU, four times the historical average, setting for record wildfire destruction in 2022, the Inquirer wrote.

With more frequent and longer heatwaves expected to be on the way, thousands of firefighters have been disposed to put out the largest wildfires in modern history.

Spain has been the hardest hit so far, losing 244,924 hectares, followed by Romania (150,528) and Portugal (77,292). Meanwhile, France burned more than 60,000 hectares, half as much again as the 43,600 it lost its previous record in 2019.

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Out of Control

EU's Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service (Cams) - which provides the satellite data used by Effis - warned that much of western Europe was in "extreme" or "very extreme" fire danger. The service reported that the intensity of ongoing blazes was significantly higher in France, Spain and Portugal than average for July and August, while wildfire carbon emissions broke all records in France and Spain.

French president Emmanuel Macron had arranged to meet firefighters and officials soon to discuss wildfire strategies after emergency teams had halted the spread of a huge wildfire near Bordeaux in the southwestern Gironde region of the country last Saturday.

Over a thousand French firefighters, along with trucks and waterbombing aircraft continued to arrive Saturday, while some 10,000 people had been evacuated from their homes and a stretch of highway was closed.

The wildfires sparked by successive heatwaves from climate change this summer had affected businesses and livelihoods. Extreme droughts brought severe consequences for farmers and ecosystems already under risk, causing agricultural loss at a time when food and supply shortage is a crisis after Russia's war against Ukraine caused inflation to spike.

According to the Effis data, so far this year, wildfires have burned a total area of land four times the country's full-year average of 66,965 hectares since records began in 2006.