PLANT MORE TREES?
Wildfires have drastically altered Attica’s landscape, satellite images show. Hillsides, forested a few years ago, have become bald and rocky. Areas where forests do resprout are often reburned. Bird song has vanished with the trees.
Data from Global Forest Watch, an initiative that uses satellites to track deforestation, shows that of all the fire-related forest loss in Attica since 2000, 74 per cent has occurred since 2017.
Greece is not alone. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has highlighted the Mediterranean region as a ‘global climate hotspot’, with an increase in surface temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels already driving an increased risk of wildfires and drought.
Wildfires are also a growing threat in the United States, Canada, Australia, and even the rainy United Kingdom. With that threat has come a debate about what to do with a forest once it has burned.
Some want to replant trees to restore root systems and to recover lost carbon sinks. Others say forests and fire zones do not mix.
So far, there is no clear evidence of which side is correct, and local factors determine what is best, the four experts said. Still, some say a rethink is needed, especially in areas where the same areas are being repeatedly burned.
“There is no great consensus on what to do,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, associate professor of fire ecology at Colorado State University. “People often want places to look like how they did before, but that might not be suitable in a new fire regime.”
Greece wants its forests back. With the help of €450 million from the EU, the government has adopted a national fire prevention plan that also includes planting 1 million trees in Attica.
“The increase of greenery and its preservation is not only a goal of the government but of the entire European Union,” said Efstathios Stathopoulos, Greece’s General Secretary of Forestry.
The EU has a plan to replant 3 billion trees across the bloc by 2030, although the plan is not focused on replanting after fires.
Not everyone thinks resowing forests after fires works.
Theodore Giannaros, a fire meteorologist at the National Observatory of Athens, surveilled a hillside outside Athens blackened by last month’s fire.
Next year, he said, the ground there, already baking in summer, will be even hotter for the lack of shade. The loss of tree root systems will make the soil looser, increasing the risk of floods or landslides, he said. There will be more dust.
Less flammable vegetation like some kinds of grasses or agricultural land is the answer, not trees, he said.
“We have to seriously focus on how to restore the landscape, not just planting trees and forests, but in a way that will be…more resilient against natural disasters.”
Fernando Pulido, professor of forestry science at the University of Extremadura in Spain, recommended planting crops or creating other barriers between dense forests in the Mediterranean region.
“This involves a change in mentality … but it’s the only way to guarantee that there won’t be another fire at the same place after eight or 10 years,” he said.
