Fire and Plantations in Portugal
By Oliver Munnion
A case study on the risks of using tree plantations to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Devastating wildfires are increasingly a feature of summers across the globe, and their intensity and scale have been linked directly to climate change in a number of recent publications. Longer fire seasons, coupled with heatwave and drought conditions, from California to Chile and Siberia to Greece, are more likely, more frequent, and more intense. Forest fires north of the Arctic Circle, unprecedented loss of life in Greece and Portugal, and unique geophysical phenomena such as the “firenados” in California are becoming the “new normal” in our climate-changed world.