The sharp rise in temperatures during the past two weeks revealed major gaps in the strategy to protect Syrian forests and wooded agricultural lands, especially in the coastal and northern region, where most of the Syrian forests are concentrated in density and diversity.
For more than two weeks, the concerned authorities have been struggling to preserve our forest wealth, especially firefighters and civil defense, in addition to the efforts of the Syrian Arab Army and citizens to extinguish the mobile fires in our majestic mountains in an unequal battle with the fire, as these areas lack the principles of firefighting, including agricultural methods and capable firefighting tools. To deal with rugged areas and difficulty trapping flames.
The expansion of this year’s fires, their spread to residential areas and their threat to the lives of the population requires the Ministry of Agriculture to re-individualize its plan papers to combat forest fires and to develop a new strategy to ensure the provision of modern and advanced firefighting equipment and to create roads that allow the firefighting personnel to move quickly, prevent the establishment of population gatherings near forests and separate agricultural lands On behalf of its forestry counterpart, to prevent the spread of fires between them, and more importantly, to take all measures to protect the population close to forests from the dangers of fires, in addition to doubling the number of workers and guards involved in preserving plant and forest wealth and preventing encroachment thereof, tightening laws on protecting forests and finding a participatory formula with citizens to strengthen the system Protection and reporting of exploits.
Climatic changes and the sharp rise in temperatures also require the concerned authorities to provide all preventive measures from forest fires directly adjacent to agricultural lands, public roads and residential areas and through which electric power transmission lines pass, as it is possible to follow several instructions and provide safety areas of roads and areas. Empty prevent these fires greatly and the ability to deal with any fire quickly and effectively.
It is known that the areas in which forests are concentrated in Syria get the highest percentage of rain in Syria, and this provides a very important factor to help extinguish fires by providing water by establishing large and small water dams in these agricultural and forest areas that allow firefighters to obtain water in the shortest time possible.
During the past years, successive governments have completed many dams and water dams that are far apart in the coastal and northern region in which forests are concentrated for the purpose of providing irrigation water, enhancing groundwater and securing drinking water for citizens, but the distribution and spacing of these dams and dams does not serve their investment in extinguishing fires, which calls for a re-examination of this matter. And avoid the loophole that firefighters and agricultural workers faced in their mighty work to extinguish fires with high professionalism.
The difficulties faced by firefighters and civil defense in rugged areas have led to our loss of a large cover of our natural forests. With some preemptive measures and a small loss of these forests, we can provide protection for large areas of them by building roads and adopting isolated islands within a single forest and thinking about providing aircraft and helicopters for extinguishing forest fires. .
Before the eyes of all Syrians, the firefighters, our civil defense, our army men and the citizens presented and are still the brightest image in the face of forest fires and agricultural lands and without this cooperation between all concerned, the losses would have been much greater and this requires the Ministry of Agriculture to enable this work to benefit from it in the following years without neglecting awareness The serious damage of the loss of vegetation and forest cover.
Revolution newspaper