KYIV. UkraineGate . 15 . August .2022 l World News.
The European Union is on track for a record-breaking wildfire season, the bloc’s fire monitoring service has warned. This year, the flames destroyed an area that is more than twice the area of Luxembourg, .
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of the Heat Wave that follow one another — part of the warming trend caused by climate change — and the constant lack of rainfall have turned much of Europe into a powder tub this summer, making it easy to spread fires, the publication notes.
According to an update by the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) as of Sunday, since the beginning of 2022, flames have destroyed nearly 660,000 hectares of EU land — an area that is more than twice the area of Luxembourg.
In 2017, the block’s strongest known forest fire to date, about 420,000 hectares were burned by mid-August before that area rose to 988,087 hectares in October, a figure for the year. EFFIS has warned that the fire season is far from over and a new record could be set this year.
Spain, Romania and Portugal are the eu’s most affected by the fires this year. France was also hit hard, with more than 60,000 hectares burned last week, well above the country’s previous record of 43,600 hectares for all of 2019.
But as Europe gets hotter, forest fires are increasingly occurring in the north. EFFIS says that since 2010 there has been a tendency to increase the number of fires in central and northern Europe.
As the heat subsided last week and the rain brought some relief, EFFIS said Sunday that the forest fire situation was improving somewhat, although the risk remains high for the Iberian Peninsula and from eastern France through Belgium to Germany.
Source: Ukrgate