00:00Right, let's bring in Dr. Emma Hill, a climate expert at Liverpool, John Moores University.
00:05Thanks so much for joining us. I think you've heard all the reports coming in,
00:09and officials are basically saying it's out of control beyond our capacity.
00:14Firefighters seem largely overwhelmed, even with additional resources.
00:18Why is it so difficult to contain these fires?
00:21Hi, Sally. I think you've hit the nail on the head.
00:24It's because these fires are covering such an extensive area with such intensity
00:30that the crews often can't get close enough to them to deal with the blaze or to create fire breaks.
00:37It may be that access to the sites has become difficult.
00:42They need breaks, and once upon a time you might have had breaks overnight where the temperatures were dropping,
00:49and that's not happening anymore because the temperatures are staying high throughout the 24-hour period.
00:55You also have to bear in mind that emergency crews are dealing with multiple fires in multiple places,
01:02and you can't move quickly between them.
01:03They're evacuating tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and again, that takes resources.
01:09Firefighters may also be involved in protecting areas where people will be evacuated to two
01:14rather than tackling a blaze itself.
01:17It's about prioritization of events in order to protect the population and to protect infrastructure.
01:25So it's been very, very difficult for crews to try and tackle such intense blazes,
01:31and a couple of your reporters there talked about the firebombs,
01:34the waterbombs used, the helicopters used to bring water in.
01:39They can be incredibly effective, but when you have such strong winds,
01:43those aircraft can be grounded, or the drop of the water might not be as effective
01:48because the wind is blowing the water out of where it needs to go.
01:52So unfortunately, it's sort of a bit of a crucible of events that just makes this very, very hard to
01:57tackle.
01:58And I think, you know, we know that climate change has a role to play,
02:02and that this could become the new normal.
02:05If that is indeed the case, what are the lessons we need to be learning now
02:10to make sure that we manage wildfires across Europe better in the future?
02:16Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's an incredibly complex series of events,
02:20and you cannot necessarily attribute a single wildfire or series of wildfires to climate change.
02:27But what we do know is that the trends we're seeing are increasing our vulnerability.
02:32So we've got these hotter, drier summers, and drier being sort of one of the operative words there.
02:37The vegetation is drying out earlier. The soil moisture is lower. It's windier.
02:42And that's part of the reason why these fires are expanding as well,
02:45is they're being blown across the landscape.
02:48But often it's also in conjunction with poor land management,
02:53not necessarily as a result of political choices, as a result of demographic changes.
03:00So we're seeing rural depopulation. We're seeing ageing populations in rural areas.
03:06That means that the landscape isn't being managed perhaps as well as it might have been in the past.
03:11So we've got this increasing understory, so grasses, things like gorse and shrubs,
03:18that create that tinder for the fire to really take hold of before it then advances into the trees.
03:23So we really need to ensure that that fuel, that fire fuel, is managed,
03:29and it's regularly clearing that understory and making sure that that tinder is not there
03:34or is not there in the levels that it is at the moment.
03:38That means that the fire can't ignite as easily, or if it does ignite, it won't spread.
03:43We also need to think about the diversity of our forests.
03:47Again, I think your first reporter there talked about seeing it spread through the pine forests in France.
03:53What we need is a forest that is adapted to fire and that it will withstand fire,
04:00so more native species, less monoculture.
04:03Where we do have monoculture and we do have pine forests,
04:06again, we want to thin them and we want to create buffer zones and fire breaks,
04:10again, to stop that kind of 500-metre arc of fire,
04:13that it will hit something that will then ignite further.
04:16We can also think about things like controlled berms,
04:19to, again, kind of create a break that the fire then has no tinder to draw on.
04:24But we also need to link that up with communication and monitoring,
04:28and we need to get communities involved,
04:30because sometimes this is about human action
04:34and the fact that we might have triggered unwittingly a fire
04:38through our use of a disposable barbecue, through a cigarette,
04:42through the waste that we throw out.
04:44You know, and thank you so much for your time.
04:47This is a very holistic approach that we have to take
04:50if we're going to prevent this sort of thing happening in the future.
04:53Thanks so much for your insights.
04:55That's Dr. Emma Hill, climate expert at Liverpool John Moores University.
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