Forest fires in Portugal: how reforestation can succeed

The night it rains fire begins for Rafael Marques with a phone call.

It's the evening of July 13, just before 9 p.m.

The biologist is about to open a beer when something hums in his pocket.

A friend on the other end.

"Do you know that there is a fire in your village?"

Canelas is an unassuming spot in the heart of Portugal.

A good thousand inhabitants, white houses, orange-red roof tiles.

No proper sidewalks, a bumpy thoroughfare.

When Marques arrived, his small wooden hut had already burned down.

The eucalyptus trees at his grandparents' house burned like 25 meter high torches.

It was an inferno like Dante's, Marques remembers and shows photos.

With a small association and a few fellow students, he had been converting a corn field on the edge of the village back into a native forest here since 2016.

Eucalyptus grew all around, as in many areas of Portugal.

Tourists often mistake the trees for a native species, although they have only been planted intentionally for a few decades.

Eucalyptus grows fast, is undemanding - but it burns almost like gasoline.

The catastrophe

No other country in Europe has suffered as much from forest fires as Portugal in the past ten years - no other tree grows here as often as eucalyptus.

The fire doesn't just char the tree, it actually explodes its fibrous, oily bark.

When Rafael Marques reached the edge of the village that evening in July, the treetops of the adjacent eucalyptus forest were already burning.

The horizon glows orange.

The burning leaves dance quietly through the night like glowing snow.

This is how fire spreads even further.

The fire destroyed more than 2500 hectares of land, two nearby highways have to be closed.

But miraculously, the flames singe only the first row of trees on Marques' property.

Apart from bushes and the garden shed, nothing burns down.

In the midst of scorched earth, it's already blooming again on two manageable hectares, bumblebees are flying around.

Marques enthusiastically explains that rare snakes lived in the water tank.

What sounds like good luck, he says, is the result of biological fire protection.

The soil on his property was damp and the trees he planted were resistant.

That's why the fire stopped - just like their forest, he and his comrades-in-arms would now like to reforest the burned area.

Help is urgently needed.

Across Portugal, four times as much land has already burned as it did last year.

The wildfire season isn't over yet, but it's already the worst since 2017, when more than a hundred people died.

After all, the number of victims is lower this year.

But in no other country in Europe has it burned more in recent years.

In public, the discussion often revolves around technology, large firefighting aircraft, heroic stories.

Prevention is much more important, say experts.

The fast money

However, biologists like Rafael Marques will only promote reforestation in very few places.

Because the powerful wood and paper industry is now planning to grow even more eucalyptus.

So far, a 2017 law prohibits the expansion.

Now, in the year of new forest fire records, they think they can overturn it.

This is the only way to use the forest efficiently in times of rural exodus and climate change.

This is the only way to effectively stop the risk of fire.

"We need more, not less, eucalyptus," they say.

More fire-prone monocultures - that sounds like a crazy idea.

Environmentalists warn of the consequences.

But are there any realistic alternatives?

Luís Damas is the man who was the first to loudly call for the end of the eucalyptus ban.

Damas is President of the Portuguese Association of Forest Owners.

A big, strong guy.

The Portuguese that the 59-year-old speaks sounds grounded and deep.

He has lived all his life in Abrantes, an area not far from the Tagus.

On a tour in an air-conditioned pick-up he wants to defend his work.

It's over 30 degrees outside, barely 20 inside.

Listening to Damas, it quickly sounds like there's nothing more natural than eucalyptus plantations.

There has also been a fire at Damas this summer, and he willingly shows the kilometer-wide wasteland.

"Look!" he growls, pointing to the ground: "The eucalyptus is already growing again." In fact, it regenerates faster - critics say that's exactly what makes it dangerous.

Just minutes away is a valley Damas calls New Tasmania.

Here, he says, eucalyptus was first cultivated in Portugal in the early 20th century.

The plants came from Australia, hence the name.

Today, says Damas, the same variety is still used, Eucalyptus globulus, but it has been further developed.

He stops now in the middle of nowhere.

There is hardly any shade outside, but there is a plantation on which eucalyptus trees with thick leaves are artificially irrigated.

"This gives us more yield, and that means more money from the paper producers," says Damas and smiles.

The eucalyptus is a tree of crisis and rural exodus.

Much of Portugal's forests are owned by individuals and families.

Many properties were further divided with each generation, today they are often tiny, some as small as 0.05 hectares.

Many landowners live far away in the city.

Other trees have to grow for decades, eucalyptus can be felled every ten to twelve years on average.

For a crisis-ridden country like Portugal, the cheap tree is a safe bet, risk of fire or not.

From Damas point of view, he is simply the best of a few options.

Of course, other tree species are also planted, but eucalyptus has prevailed in recent years, says Damas.

“We have to see where the money is coming from.

Today we get 19 euros per tonne for pine trees and 55 euros for eucalyptus.« Now that transport has become expensive since the Ukraine war and biomass is in such high demand as an energy source, there is even a unique opportunity in Portugal that one must seize.

Although it seems different in times of climate change, more than 90 percent of all fires are still caused by humans.

The exact reasons are often unclear, but in addition to carelessness, arson plays a central role.

Damas sees the forest owners as active firefighters: "Of course we don't want that."

"You can rebuild a house in a year, but not a forest."

The eucalyptus is a disposable tree.

The trees can be renewed three to four times, after which the soil is broken.

The roots can only be removed with a large device, a step that costs additional money but is of no use.

Environmentalists estimate that two-thirds of the 800,000 hectares of eucalyptus forest are poorly or not at all maintained.

It is cheaper for industry to plant new land than to remove dead trees.

This is one of the reasons why it now seems lucrative to develop further areas.

What remains is a thicket full of fire accelerators.

Luís Damas doesn't want to know anything about it.

"We're cleaning up," he says.

“There's nothing on the ground where we work.

We're stopping the fire."

At the end of his tour he shows a piece of original nature.

In the middle of the plantations there is a small forest.

The paper company Navigator sponsored it, a friendly little sign reminds us of it.

Damas walks a few meters through the undergrowth, birds are chirping, water is rippling.

After a few steps, he turns around and says: "From a forestry point of view, of course, all this is useless."

Big deal

Portugal is now a world leader in paper production.

The market is controlled by two companies.

Navigator is the market leader.

Altri, Portugal's second largest eucalyptus processing company, didn't even have a PR department until last year.

Now it is opening its doors to the foreign press for the first time.

CEO José Soares de Pina speaks American English, preferring to talk about change and sustainability instead of forest fires.

At the moment, he says proudly, they are working on being able to make T-shirts from eucalyptus.

»We are the most innovative.«

He knows that the two listed companies bring the country a lot of money.

»We produce in Europe according to the highest standards.

We shape the landscape.

Our products are environmentally friendly,” he advertises.

Then Soares de Pina says a sentence that can be heard several times on this trip: "During the pandemic, you Germans were very happy to buy toilet paper made from our pulp." He laughs.

A large proportion of the trees that grow in Portugal today are purposefully planted.

Quite a few of them come from the Altri tree nursery.

The group also supplies private landowners with its seedlings.

Even the Portuguese state buys its trees here, nine million can be grown every year.

Although the site is huge, less than 50 people work there.

An hour north and right by the sea, dozens of trucks deliver wood from Portuguese forests every day.

The pulp factory looks like a eucalyptus-eating monster, excavators on five-meter-high towers throw tons of logs onto conveyor belts.

At the end of the factory is a machine that takes up the space of a soccer field and dries paper fibers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It is only stopped every year and a half, it is said to be the largest in Europe.

The companies are happy to leave the unpopular fight for more eucalyptus to the forest owners

Forest fires are also at stake here on the industrial site.

The head of security proudly tells of the company's own fleet of helicopters and a private fire-fighting team of more than 300 people who go out every summer to stop fires.

»Most of the time we are faster than the local fire brigade.«

But if you ask those responsible what they think of Luís Damas' plans for expanding the plantations, they become monosyllabic.

CEO Soares de Pina smiles kindly, then says "If we can improve the productivity of the forest in other ways, I don't think that's necessary at the moment."

The companies are happy to leave the unpopular fight for more eucalyptus to the forest owners.

They would probably benefit the most from it.

But behind the scenes senior executives openly admit that the myriad and often overgrown small lots are part of the problem.

An experienced manager even dares the unthinkable and says: "In my view, after every fire, the affected forests should simply be nationalized."

The rescue of the forest

Duarte Neves is a prospective forest engineer and only 24, but he is already leading the only government project to reforest the burned area north of the Tagus.

Monte Frio is a windswept mountain village on the edge of a natural park that has the cold in its name.

Here, of all places, the last major fire in 2017 destroyed a good 95 percent of the landscape.

Five years later, the traces of the fire can still be seen in the landscape like scars.

Only a few trees are growing again.

The eucalyptus also thrives here.

Officially, 26 percent of the forest is covered with it today, but the plant actually spreads uncontrollably in many places, even here in the nature park.

Experts estimate that there could be twice as many trees.

On behalf of the government, Duarte Neves and his team are now to show that forests can be reforested without monocultures in such a way that the risk of fire is reduced.

extensive.

Neves says he is not an opponent of the eucalyptus, but a keeper of the forest.

The project is not intended to become a protected area, but a native forest that is resilient and generates money.

In a way, a natural aisle in eucalyptus land.

Most of his work, says Neves, is persuasion.

The small hill below the village alone belongs to 40 parties - with 16 remaining residents in the village.

To find all the owners, he used the community, they went through Lisbon.

Neves is an engineer, not an activist.

He speaks softly but firmly.

Maybe that's what won me over in the end.

When they found all the owners in January, they began clearing up the deadwood on the slope.

It took them three months to remove the roughest traces.

Since March, they have been planting native varieties every two to three meters, which are said to be fire-resistant and robust.

Chestnuts, oaks, cork.

Some bushes.

As Neves talks about it, a helicopter whirrs over the mountain range.

This year it's burning on the other side.

Reforestation is a tough job.

Neves lives in his grandparents' house.

He says openly that he only has a few friends here.

For the full-time job, he gets less than a thousand euros a month.

He says his girlfriend in Lisbon earns double that in the office.

But the project could permanently change Portugal's landscape.

Anyone who wants to take part does not have to pay for the reforestation, but instead transfers control to a forest cooperative for 20 years.

This is the only way, says Neves, that the land can be cultivated in a sustainable and fire-safe manner.

He hopes the project will motivate other landowners to share their little piece of Portugal with others.

Overall, the project will cost the government just 135,000 euros over several years.

The idea is that the trees grow at different speeds, so that a part can be felled regularly.

Even with a growth period of 60 years, says Duarte Neves, the chestnut is still more profitable than pine or eucalyptus.

The income could be used to finance the project in the future, but also to attract tourists and develop the country.

You just have to wait, he says and pauses.

"And it shouldn't burn."

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