Scientists are predicting longer-burning wildfires in future decades. As Greece and Italy hit new records, does Europe need a new fire prevention strategy?
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00:00 Europe is on fire. Approximately 2,600 hectares of land have been decimated across the EU.
00:07 And the UN warns there will be more aggressive fires in the decades to come.
00:11 37.7% of the EU's land area is covered by forests. Many of them contain highly flammable trees.
00:18 So what is Europe doing to prevent the continent from burning to the ground?
00:22 The European Commission says it will buy a fleet of Canada Air jets to boost Europe's firefighting capacity.
00:29 But these planes will not be ready until 2027.
00:32 We can't keep just throwing money at the problem. We need to assume that our communities will burn at a certain point.
00:38 So we need to take short-term technical measures to protect the infrastructure.
00:43 We need to fireproof our fields, our homes, our structures.
00:47 We have to adapt to this new reality. And this is true not only for the countries in Southern Europe where we have this problem.
00:56 The climate is already quite bad and it's getting worse.
01:00 But also to countries in Central and Northern Europe where the problem of wildfires is emerging.
01:06 And they have to be prepared not only to fight them but to prevent them.
01:15 And preventative measures are exactly what the European Forest Institute and FireEU Risk are working on.
01:22 We know that in Europe most fires are caused by human action. But some are also natural.
01:28 So we are looking at the previous history of casualty fires in different parts.
01:36 And we are also looking how we can reduce these man-made fires.
01:41 FireEU Risk has surveyed every square kilometre of Europe to make civilians and governing bodies aware of the risks and the types of vegetation most likely to burn.
01:51 Fast-growing weeds, grasses, eucalyptus and pine trees all promote the spread of wildfires.
01:57 For now, fuel breaks and buffer zones can help them from spiralling out of control.
02:01 But replanting and stepping away from flammable monocultures would be effective in the long-term.
02:08 Since we can't change topography and since we can't change weather, what we can do is we can change the vegetation.
02:15 And that means we can change the structure, the type and the arrangement.
02:20 What we eventually want to achieve is that when a fire does burn, it is not as severe.
02:27 beer.
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