PUBLIC POLICY
SIXTH-GENERATION FIRES Public-policy change toward prevention required to address large-scale events
Felipe Gonzalez, former prime minister of Spain, delivered a keynote address during the 16th Wildland Fire Safety Summit | 6th Human Dimensions of Fire Conference in May. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
etween 2000 and 2017, 611 firefighters and civilians died in wildfires in European Union countries, with economic damage of more than U.S. $60.5 billion. Portugal has recorded more than 18,000 wildfires a year since 2007. Fires in 2017 killed more than 100 people. And fire seasons are extending into June and October. A 2020 EU report noted that authorities still use traditional suppression methods instead of investing in long-term prevention. In Western Europe, people are moving to cities from the countrysides. Untended fields, pastures and forests provide fuel for wildfires. Experts say there needs to be a change to prevention from suppression, and that policies need to consider climate adaptation, education and preparedness. If authorities fail to change the countryside, the European Forest Institute said in a report, emergency services will be unable to stop sixth-generation wildfires. I was in charge of the government of Spain between 1982 and 1996, coinciding in the United States with Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, and from the first moment we committed ourselves to improve the technical means and human resources to fight forest fires. At the time, there was a depopulation in Spain of the rural population from the countryside to the cities. This phenomenon produced an increase of the forest mass, especially fuel – the abandonment of rural areas allowed there to be a large area without the presence of human beings, and without intervention in nature. Our concern was to provide all the services of struggles against forest fires, and have sufficient means to detect them quickly and arrive on time, in such a way that they would not become serious fires; this was the objective, and that objective soon had a contradictory effect. We were successful for two or three or four years; taking into account the climatic variations of dry years and wet years, more fuel remained naturally on the land because we had been effective at extinguishing the fire. 12
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Remember that I am the same age as [U.S.] President [Joe] Biden, and remember what our ancestors said: the fires go out in winter, which did not mean that they had to act in winter in a special way. This was vital experience accumulated over centuries that translated into [the fact that they] lived in rural areas and took advantage of energy produced by the forest mass for everything – to heat, to cook, for everything. These people took precautions to avoid fires that would devastate their houses, their small or large properties, their livestock; they were already in the habit of preventing fires before the fires arrived, and therefore there was a direct action of preventive human beings on nature, and there was intensive use of the forest mass that people tried to keep clean to use as energy. Nature was responding to climate change at least 20 years before we became aware of climate change. We studied the socio-economic conditions of the spread and increase of forest fires including the abandonment of the rural environment, but later we were surprised by facts such as that in areas where there was no abandonment of the rural environment, fires were also produced. Therefore, the socio-economic conditions were a factor to take into account and were diverse in the different parts of the planet where fires were occurring, each more and more voracious. We reached one conclusion – the link of this growth in the power of forest fires, the sixth generation of fires, of which the specialists spoke back in 2017 – was climate change. Nature perceived much earlier than humans the effect of one degree more in temperature. Now, this evolution has reached what is called the sixth generation of fires, or mega forest fires. These are appearing in all the continents in different areas of the planet. But the great surprise, the concern, belatedly
Briefing during a TREX in the Andalusia region (Spain), organized by the INFOCA, The Nature Conservancy and the Pau Costa Foundation. PHOTO COURTESY OF TREX.
