A total of 900 thousand hectares of surface burned in 2022 in the European Union (EU), according to a report released this Wednesday by European Forest Fire Information System.
This was the second worst year for wildfires (2017 comes first, with 1.3 million hectares of area burned) since the European Forest Fire Information System began monitoring in 2000.
Fireworks too affected the Natura 2000 network, the European biodiversity reservewhich represents approximately 43% of the area burned in the EUthe largest in a decade.
The data already available for 2023 points to a burnt area of around 500,000 hectares of natural land in the EU, including the largest forest fire on record, that of Alexandroupoli, in Greece, which devastated 96,000 hectares.
This year, the report also states: “we saw rampant forest fires againdifficult to contain through traditional extinction due to their High temperatures, intensity and speed.”.
In 2023, other critical forest fires occurred in the EU in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. The report also highlights that, in 2022 and for the third year in a row, unprecedented forest fires caused “significant environmental and economic damage in the EU and tragic loss of human life.”
Source: TSF
