2.2 Why?

The rest of this course will explore why wildfires occurred and spread in Greece in more detail. However, it is initially important to appreciate that forest fires are a serious challenge in Mediterranean Europe and some Mediterranean ecosystems are both prone to fire and dependent on it to reproduce and regenerate.

The Mediterranean climate contributes to summer fire danger because:

• wet winters produce abundant fuels, while very dry, hot summers cure those fuels to high levels of flammability (Wainwright & Thornes, 2004)
• in coastal regions during the summer months, strong winds may fan forest fires
• drought recurring on a 3–5-year time scale exacerbates normal summer season fire conditions (Morehouse et al., 353–4).

Maximise

Figure 7: Area of land in Greece subject to wildfires 1955-2009

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This bar chart is labelled ‘Total yearly burned area (hectares, thousands)’ on the vertical axis. This vertical axis starts at 0 and goes up to 300, in 50 thousand hectare intervals. The horizontal axis is labelled ‘Year’ and goes from 1955 to 2009. In 1955 there were approximately 10 thousand hectares burned by wildfires, but this began to rise significantly from the mid-1970s onwards. Although the number of thousand hectares per year fluctuated significantly throughout this time, there were significant ‘blips’ or higher readings in some years than others. For example: 1977, 55 thousand hectares; 1981, 70 thousand hectares; 1985, 105 thousand hectares; 1988, 110 thousand hectares; 1998, 95 thousand hectares; 2000, 170 thousand hectares; 2007, 260 thousand hectares. Apart from these years with ‘blips’ or higher readings, all years stayed below 50 and fell back to low levels seen only up to 1976 in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.

Figure 7: Area of land in Greece subject to wildfires 1955-2009

As you can see from Figure 7, the number and frequency of fire events has been increasing since the mid-1970s. Though more extreme dry summers may be a factor, evidence suggests that a complex combination of human factors, physical conditions, and ecological processes combine to produce a distinctive form of fire with particular environmental consequences. Significantly more severe than previous events, the Greek wildfires of 2007 exemplify this:

• some but not all of the Greek wildfires of 2007 were set deliberately by humans
• forms of agricultural practice exacerbated the risks
• political organisation and mismanagement undermined responses
• economic and property development opportunities provided incentives for land use change
• climatic, ecological and resourcing issues made environmental restoration difficult.

This range of factors will be explored in more detail in Section 3: Wildfires as environment-society entanglements.