Zaragoza, Jan 25 (EFE).- The former President of the Government Felipe González has warned that behind the large forest fires is not only the abandonment of the territory, but also climate change, and to fight them money and more means are required, in addition to a management of the forest mass that respects the landscape and the peasantry, that is, the population.
This has been revealed during his participation, together with the president of Aragon, Javier Lambán, in the forum ‘The challenge of large forest fires. Impacts on the territory’ which is being held this Wednesday and tomorrow Thursday in Zaragoza, organized by the regional government, in collaboration with the Felipe González Foundation and its lever ‘Megaincendios: between chaos and opportunity’.
In 2022, the fires burned 309,000 hectares in Spain, a territory “five times larger than the province of Álava”, of which more than 20,000 burned in Aragon in fires that compromised the safety of urban areas, such as Moros , and forced the eviction of thirteen municipalities and more than 3,300 people.
But as the meteorologist Eduardo Lolumo has shown in the introduction to the forum and that Felipe González himself has also recalled later, it is not a phenomenon that occurs only in territories with a dry and hot climate, but also “in parts of the world where there is no they are used to”, such as Siberia, where the fires destroyed 800,000 hectares, and also “thousands” in North American forests.
“In addition, now they are mega-fires,” said Lolumo, of the sixth generation, previously “rare”, which release a large amount of energy, “like a storm”, and which are difficult to control, in which “it seems that the key factor it is the temperature and humidity”, although it also points to, he added, the abandonment of agriculture and livestock, the accumulation of fuel or the misuse of controlled fires.
González has also agreed that “not only the abandonment” of the territory is the cause and has said that there are areas that have never seen fires of these magnitudes and that now have them, so “there is only one common element: climate change », assured the former president.
González has recognized that more money is needed in the fight against fires but has insisted on the importance of having management plans and public-private collaboration to, for example, take advantage of the forest mass for the transformation into energy, but for this , he stressed, “you have to know and respect the peasantry.”
“We find ourselves with an excess of banal wisdom that tries to do from the offices what the countrymen have been doing for centuries,” González criticized.
For his part, the Aragonese president, who has defined last summer as “atrocious”, has warned that in this Community it is “unthinkable to do politics without placing depopulation at the forefront of any program”, while criticizing the ” romantic vision” of those who propose solutions based on elements of the past.
«There is no possibility of going back to the past, people do not go to the mountains to collect firewood to keep warm; there are no sheep; there are no goats. Either public-private collaboration is used or there is no way to clean up”, Lambán pointed out, recalling that despite the “great effort” and “good management” of the Department of Agriculture, the impact is “insignificant in relation to what should be do”. EFE
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