Portuguese and EC authorities look to extreme fire mitigation including goats and expropriation

According to Autoridade Florestal Nacional, AFN, the official agency for the management of forests, 71,700 hectares of forests were burned by fires between the 1 January and 15 August as a result of 12,700 large and small fires. It is the largest area burned in the period since 2005, when the number reached almost 200,000 hectares. The fires have caused losses to industries like agriculture, pulp and paper and tourism and threatens the government’s official target of preventing forest fires from burning more than 100,000 hectares a year by 2012. Several fires were reported in the country after the release of AFN’s latest report, and the frequency of new fires was believed to have increased in August. The opposition to the Portuguese government has also claimed the severity of the situation was downplayed by the AFN, and that final assessments by the organisation would reveal the true extent of the destruction.hideThe AFN data does not include cultivated agricultural land that has been destroyed by the forest fires. The Portuguese media has mentioned data from the European Forest Fire Information System, EFFIS, an EU-wide monitoring body, according to which the area burned by mid-August surpassed 92,900 hectares including agricultural lands. Most of the fires have taken place in the north of Portugal, with the Porto district the worst affected. Almost 80% of the destruction highlighted by AFN was caused by 73 large fires which burned at least 100 hectares each. HIGHER MEAN TEMPERATURES According to AFN, particularly hot weather was largely responsible for the increase in the occurrence of forest fires this year. The body mentions data from Instituto de Meterologia, Portugal’s weather institute, which claims that the average maximum temperature in the country reached 33.9 degrees Celsius in the first 12 days of August, which is 5.1 degrees more than the historical average for the period. “The location of Portugal, in a transition zone between the climates of the Mediterranean and of continental Europe, makes our forests particularly vulnerable to fires,” said João Fernando Pereira Gomes, from Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, a Lisbon-based engineering school. “Of course this doesn’t explain everything, as such characteristics are common to other countries where this scourge doesn’t happen with the same intensity or frequency. There is no doubt that what is going on has a lot to do with the bad management of Portugal’s forests and a lack of efficent measures to prevent and fight the fires,” he said. ANEFA, an association of rural producers, has blamed the Portuguese government for not investing enough in the forestry sector to promote fire prevention practices. Mr Gomes, who has been studying Portugal’s forest fires for several years, lists several reasons why the country suffers so much from such fires. Alien varieties of trees, not always capable of coping with the challenges presented by the Portuguese weather, have been introduced. Most of the forest is owned by small farmers who don’t have the means to adopt efficient preventive measures or simply leave their land unattended. Large stretches are made of monocultures of pine and eucalyptus, which are more likely to inflame than other trees, he said. Also there are plenty of land holdings that, in practice, are not owned by anyone, as previous owners have died or they have been abandoned because of desertification, he added. The situation is aggravated by the fact that many farmers still use fire to prepare their soil for new crops and to clean up the land. Arson is common, but rarely penalised by the authorities, and the personnel and equipment available to monitor the country’s forest are deemed to be insufficient. The authorities estimate that at least one in every four fires is criminal, and almost half of them are the result of negligence. Mr Gomes notes that the government has been unable so far to create an up-to-date register that gathers all data on land ownership in the country, which makes it even more difficult to spread knowledge on fire prevention among farmers. It also hampers any effort that could be taken to criminalise cases of negligence among landowners, a dramatic measure that Mr Gomes considers essential to improve fire prevention practices. A more conclusive solution could be achieved by the nationalisation of properties where owners don’t comply with the best practices, and maybe their subsequent concession to large private companies that exploit forest areas, like pulp and paper producers and furniture makers. “The share of the forest that is owned by pulp firms is managed in a way that they rarely catch fire. It shows that prevention measures can work,” Mr Gomes pointed out. LARGE LOSSES This year, the Portuguese authorities have deployed thousands of firefighters and even hundreds of Army troops to fight forest fires. The cost has yet to be officially determined, but is likely to be significant. It is estimated that the catastrophic fires that hit Portugal in 2003, when more than 425,000 hectares were destroyed, caused losses of more than €1bn. Firms and farmers that suffer losses have few options to transfer the risk, as forest fire insurance is very hard to buy in the Portuguese market because of the high risk that forest fires represent. CA Seguros, a unit of France’s Crédit Agricole, has recently launched an insurance policy against forest fires, but it is sold with a number of restrictions. For instance, it can only be bought by rural producers that are members of União da Floresta Mediterrânica, UNAC, a farmers’ association. Farmers who wish to buy coverage must first elaborate a forest management plan and submit it for approval by UNAC. Only areas of over 50 hectares can be insured. In the meantime other ideas to mitigate the risk are being implemented. In a bid to help fight forest fires in northern Portugal and in the Spanish region of Duero, a project sponsored by a European Commission- backed body will spend €48m to introduce 120,000 goats in the area to help prevention works. The animals will be expected to eat remnants of plants that are believed to fuel the propagation of fires. The theory is that stretches of land that have been abandoned by farmers are particularly likely to burn, and that the re-population of the land with the goats could help solve the problem. About 500 new jobs for shepherds and other workers will be created by the project, that will be implemented by the EU’s Douro-Deuro European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation.

Portuguese and EC authorities look to extreme fire mitigation including goats and expropriation

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