An international organization claims that there are no mafia fires in Portugal



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Portugal spends Spain in the number of forest fires and burned area. There is 35% more occurrences and 20% destruction here than on the other side of the border.

The data comes from a report from the World Wide Fund (WWF) organization on fires in the Iberian region. Calls on politicians to stop talking about fire mafias. Why? Because there is no

The two Iberian countries are in the same boat as the impact of fires on the territory. But according to the WWF report, "the blackest bill concerns Portugal: last year, the national area burned quintupled, totaling 440 000 hectares", an average of nearly 400% more than during the last decade. "The study, presented this morning in Lisbon by a working group bringing together Portuguese and Spaniards, warned that" both the countries face the same urgency because of this new wave of big Forest fires characterized by unstable behavior and often occurring outside the expected season. "

But Portugal" is the European country most affected by fires. "" In the last 30 years, it is the country that has experienced the highest rate per zone and where fires were more important: on average, in our country, there are 35% more occurrences than in Spain and 20% more surface area.The comparisons with the rest of the world are even more penalizing for the Portuguese : the country "is the first in Europe and the fourth in the world with the largest mass of forest lost so far."

The eucalyptus is not a damn tree

Considering the fires from last year until October 31st, 94% of the 16,981 requests for help were recorded north of the Tagus.According to the environmental non-governmental organization it is recurrent and mainly affects the districts of Porto, Braga, Viana do Castelo, Vila Real and Viseu

. causes of flames, the WWF begins by "demystifying" certain ideas. "

" The arson, environmental terrorism or organized mafias are recurrent expressions that are repeated when there is a wave of fires like the one that reached the Iberian north-west in October 2017, or in Galicia in 2006, "remember the experts, who leave a message to power:" Policy makers must be very careful about what kind of statements that confuse public opinion and not "

" On the contrary, they should talk about the unregulated use of fire in the Northwest, rural abandonment, lack of forest management, zero planning territory that has surrounded villages with increasing amounts of forest biomass, or very little investment in real prevention. "

Eucalyptus is the" extensive monoculture of eucalyptus that crosses the Cantabrian Corniche (north of Lugo and A Coruña, the coastal lines of Asturias and Cantabria and the western valleys of Vizcaya) rarely burns, "because why "eucalyptus trees in Portugal, Pontevedra, Huelva or Seville repeatedly burn in very dangerous fires"? "The flammability of a forest mass does not depend on the species, but on its structure , that is, the amount and form in which the available biomass is organized, and this is a direct consequence of the management of these forests, so a eucalyptus plantation in production n & # 39; It is not as flammable as an abandoned plantation, "reads a document distributed to journalists, stressing the need to" promote collective forest planning. "

The lights do not come out with water.

According to the WWF, the cost of firefighting in both Iberian countries "far exceeds one billion euros each year". "Today, most of the funding allocated to forests in regional and national budgets is destined to be extinguished." Big Fires buys more seaplanes, more trucks or create more water points.

The paths of the solution do not bring anything back to what has been said for a long time, but the WWF lists them in three pillars and suggests a concerted struggle between the two countries: "a strategic fire prevention at the Iberian level that revitalizes the territory and makes it less vulnerable, measures against impunity, since less than 10% of the authors of fires are identified, and effective action on the issue of climate change. " [19659019] (function (d, s, id) {
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