by Abel Gil*<\/p>\n
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Benicarl\u00f3, Nules and Burriana. This August, in just one week, fires have broken out in all of these municipalities in the Spanish province of Castell\u00f3n.<\/strong> In all three cases, the flames spread through abandoned crops.<\/strong> It is a story of the Levante<\/strong> (the Eastern part of the Iberian peninsula) but also of the whole of Europe: the abandonment of rural areas is leaving millions of hectares<\/strong> at the mercy of nature and, consequently, fire.<\/p>\n It is not a new threat, but an increasingly dangerous one, as fires are increasing on the continent. It is also not a linear process: the affected areas vary from year to year, with peaks and drops every five years.<\/strong> Major fire seasons produced particularly desolate landscapes in 2003, 2007, 2012, 2017 and 2022, with between 700,000 and 1.2 million hectares<\/strong> burned<\/strong>, areas comparable to Cyprus or Kosovo.<\/p>\n The causes<\/strong> of this increase in fires are complex<\/strong>. Climate change is leading to an increasing number of warm and dry episodes<\/strong> that are increasingly reaching further North, favouring the dryness<\/strong> of the terrain which fans flames. However, there is another key factor: land use change.<\/strong> The Europe of 2022 is very different from the Europe at the beginning of the century, with a major change in landscape and land management that began decades ago but whose consequences we are only seeing now. The current fire map of Europe is, in this sense, an illustration of the rural exodus and abandonment of the countryside.<\/p>\nA non-linear growing process<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n