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Fires in Saxony and Brandenburg: Germany becomes a forest fire country

2022-07-27T16:01:36.494Z


Large fires are becoming the new normal in times of climate crisis. On the other hand, we as a society must develop a fire culture - and we need a political answer.


Firefighters battle a fire in Australia in 2019

Photo: Sam Mooy/ Getty Images

I am standing on a viewing platform on a mountain.

My gaze wanders down the slope over the charred ground.

It is covered by burned vegetation remains.

I slowly look up and see burned trees.

Slight irritation that some leaves are still hanging.

But they also look burned.

My gaze slowly wanders, I recognize that there are clouds of smoke hanging in the air, which I already guessed from the smell.

I look higher and higher, and a hellish landscape unfolds.

It doesn't look real, more like a gigantic disaster movie set.

Nebulized by the smoke of burned trees, plants, animals line up hill after hill, each one is wooded, or more aptly: was wooded.

Because the trees are all burned.

There's just nothing left, nothing but skeleton trees and smoke in the air.

Unlike fresh smoke, it no longer hurts the nose and throat about ten days after the last major fires went out.

But I perceive a kind of olfactory echo of the acrid fumes, my nose remembering the aggressive smoke of a fire that was still burning a few days earlier.

My gaze leads into the distance, one, two, three, four, five rows of hills, all burned.

Up to the horizon there is not a spot where the fires have not raged.

It feels like a particularly monotonous form of apocalypse happened here, but an apocalypse nonetheless.

I captured these moments on a short video;

there is an approximate impression.

Germany is heading for a fire record year

The scene was recorded in Australia in early 2020, when I was talking about the fires of the century that we – a pandemic and a European war of aggression later – have practically forgotten on the other side of the world.

My trip back then was because I am fascinated by such major fires, a sentence that admittedly sounds like “I like listening to music”.

But what I was able to observe there and also the conversations with those affected help me to better classify the current fires.

The reason why I am writing down my Australian research is one of the underestimated consequences of the climate catastrophe: Germany is now becoming a forest fire country.

That says forest fire expert Somidh Saha from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

This assessment follows the research project "Pyrophobic" that is investigating in Brandenburg how "forests can arm themselves against fires and climate change".

It also looks at how forests can recover after a forest fire, but this is where research has suffered a setback - a large part of the research area has recently burned again.

All of Europe is currently on fire, Germany is heading for a fire record year.

According to experts, Australia has long been a forest or bush fire country.

A clear indication is, on the one hand, the ancient, clever fire culture of the indigenous population.

And on the other hand, there are many pyrophilic plants in Australia, such as banksia.

These are trees that can use fire for propagation.

The outer layer of their cones burns, but underneath is a substance that protects the inside containing the seeds from the heat.

After the fire, the seed pods open, often with the first rain to hit the burnt cone.

Because Australia has been a forest fire country for so long, the findings there can only be partially transferred to Germany.

But there are some things you can learn.

The over-romanticization of nature

Perhaps the most important lesson is that the over-romanticization of nature, which works even more in cities than in the countryside, is completely misplaced.

In Australia, white racist arrogance brought from Europe has for many years meant that the ancient Aboriginal fire culture was despised.

It was replaced by fighting fire without any differentiation, because in the white minds fire was something invariably evil, bad, threatening.

more on the subject

  • Climate resilience in the forest: Fireproof forests often fail because of BambiBy Julia Koch

  • Forest fire in the Elbe-Elster district: 200 meters to the fire wall by Hannes Schrader, Falkenberg/Elster

  • Adaptation to heat waves: "The severe consequences of climate change for Germany are underestimated" by Sophie Garbe

A naïve form of environmental protection has also played a role in Australia's earlier firefighting strategies.

The targeted destruction of nature is an important part of long-term protection.

Regular, controlled, and intentionally set fires at specific times prevent too much combustible undergrowth from developing.

The over-romanticization of nature and especially of the forest is also a typical German attitude, unfortunately it often goes hand in hand with the complete ignoring of the rules of an ecosystem and is supplemented by economic greed and short-sightedness.

For these reasons, a kind of monocultural Blitzwald was created over decades in some parts of Germany, for example from pine trees, which grows particularly quickly.

But it also burns particularly violently and is also more susceptible to pests.

How the climate catastrophe is fanning the fires

Germany is becoming a forest fire country, also because the climate catastrophe brings with it an unprecedented drought.

The combination of drought and heat creates gigantic amounts of combustible material and reduces the trees' fire resistance.

Compared to Australia, nature in Germany is blessed with significantly fewer pyrophilic plants and creatures.

The fires could therefore have an even more devastating effect in the short and medium term.

However, you don't have to worry about nature as much as about people.

If Germany becomes a forest fire country, we must develop a fire culture.

You can compare that with the flood culture on the North Sea and Baltic Sea or in classic flood areas.

The most visible signs are dikes and dams, but the closer you look, the more you realize that there are a surprising number of areas of life that are directly or indirectly affected by flooding.

The housing of animals on farms, the foundations of houses, such as basements and ground floors are used.

A good part of the German flood culture may have been buried, however, because in the meantime people imagined that they had nature completely under control.

A fallacy that can perhaps become even more dangerous in the case of fire.

A German fire culture must begin with a functioning warning system.

The importance of fire culture and new technology

With the warning system debacle for the Ahr valley flood, we had to recognize that Germany has already failed.

Disaster control as a survival issue has all but disappeared from people's minds over the last few decades, now the need is coming back with great force.

It is true that far more people die from heat waves than from the fire itself. The destructive force is nevertheless extremely dangerous.

And if only indirectly: a few weeks ago the old town of a Thuringian village caught fire and the fire brigade had to temporarily stop extinguishing the fire because the water ran out.

Because of the ongoing drought.

The necessary development of a fire culture includes the dissemination of knowledge about fire.

A disturbingly high number of forest fires are caused by arson, and education is unlikely to help, but negligence also plays a major role.

You don't need to have studied fire science for twelve semesters to realize that you should never throw lit cigarettes into the vegetation.

But it is a little less known that cars that have just been driven have extremely hot metal parts on the underbody that can easily ignite dry plants.

And you can still see people barbecuing or lighting campfires in the middle of nature, even in extreme droughts.

Of course, in addition to civil society, politics in particular is strongly required to have more comprehensive fire protection concepts developed.

This also includes regulating German forestry more intelligently.

Many pine trees are still being planted, and extremely flammable monocultures are still being cultivated.

And also new technologies can and must be used .

In Australia, drones equipped with a wide variety of sensors are used to detect fires early on based on gas and temperature changes and to collect data.

There are even attempts to use them to extinguish or to strategically, controlled ignite individual parts of the forest.

With the help of artificial intelligence, it is now possible to calculate where and how fires are most likely to break out.

To some city dwellers, that may sound like overkill.

But if Germany actually becomes a forest fire country, such preparation seems wiser and ultimately cheaper than waiting for the Ahr Valley of the fire.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2022-07-27

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