Thirteen people have been arrested following a forest fire on the Greek island of Hydra, which authorities believe was started by fireworks launched from a yacht. The fire, which started on Friday, devastated the island’s sole pine forest. Although now under control, the fire presented significant challenges for firefighters who had to access the area by sea and use helicopters to drop water due to the lack of roads leading to the beach.

Hydra, southwest of Athens in the Saronic Gulf, is popular among foreign visitors and those travelling on yachts.

The latest blaze was ”caused by fireworks launched from a boat and burned the only pine forest on the island in a place that is difficult to access and has no road”, Hydra’s firefighting team said on Facebook.

In a statement on Saturday, Greek authorities confirmed the arrest of 13 Greek citizens who are scheduled to appear before prosecutors on Sunday. An official said the people were arrested at an Athens area marina.

The incident has caused widespread outrage in Greece, which is already grappling with multiple wildfires amidst its first heatwave of the year. The country has been on high alert for wildfires due to dry conditions, strong winds, and high temperatures, which are expected to persist throughout the summer. Officials say 64 forest and brush fires have broken out in Greece over the past 24 hours. 

Hydra’s mayor, Giorgos Koukoudakis, expressed anger over the reckless actions that led to the fire. 

“We are indignant that some people so irresponsibly throw fireworks into a pine forest,” Hydra’s mayor, Giorgos Koukoudakis, told Greek broadcaster ERT.

In a related incident, a 55-year-old volunteer firefighter succumbed to injuries sustained while combating a fire in the Ilia region of the Peloponnese peninsula.

Scientists have warned that fossil fuel emissions caused by humans are worsening the length and intensity of heat waves around the world.

Additionally, arson remains a significant problem, with 79 people arrested for arson last August. To combat this, Greece increased penalties for both deliberate and negligent arson last year, introducing fines of up to 200,000 Euro and jail sentences of up to 20 years​

Toronto:

A wildfire burning near Fort Nelson, in rural British Columbia has grown in size but is moving away from the town, offering some relief to residents who were forced to evacuate, a provincial wildfire service said on Tuesday.

Some 3,000 residents had to flee the town after the fire was discovered on May 10, and is believed to be human caused, the agency added.

Still, across Canada some 135 active fires are burning of which 40 are out of control. The Environment Canada has issued air quality advisories on Tuesday for British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

Smoke from wildfires in northeast British Columbia have worsened air quality and reduced visibility in northwest Alberta, Environment Canada said.

The agency forecasts a wind shift on Thursday, resulting in some improvement, but additional fires burning near the Northwest Territories border are likely to contribute to continued poor air quality.

“Wildfire smoke will spread across parts of northern Alberta today and will continue on Wednesday,” Environment Canada said.

Wildfire season in Canada typically runs from April, when the snow melts, until September or October when cooler temperatures and increased precipitation helps dampen fire activity.

Last year, Canada recorded its worst-ever wildfire season, with over 6,000 fires torching some 18.5 million hectares (45 million acres) simultaneously in the east and west of the country, according to Natural Resources Canada.

A number of active fires in the province of Manitoba has resulted in evacuation of thousands of residents in the town of Cranberry Portage, according to a fire bulletin from the Manitoba Wildfire Service.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A soldier works to contain wildfires in Nogales, in the High Mountains area of Veracruz state, Mexico, Monday, March 25, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

In the U.S., wildland firefighters are able to stop about 98% of all wildfires before the fires have burned even 100 acres. That may seem comforting, but decades of quickly suppressing fires has had unintended consequences.

Fires are a natural part of many landscapes globally. When forests aren’t allowed to burn, they become more dense, and dead branches, leaves and other biomass accumulate, leaving more fuel for the next fire. This buildup leads to more extreme fires that are even harder to put out. That’s why land managers set controlled burns and thin forests to clear out the undergrowth.

However, fuel accumulation isn’t the only consequence of fire suppression.

Fire suppression also disproportionately reduces certain types of fire. In a new study, my colleagues and I show how this effect, known as the suppression bias, compounds the impacts of fuel accumulation and climate change.

What happened to all the low-intensity fires?

Most wildfires are low-intensity. They ignite when conditions aren’t too dry or windy, and they can often be quickly extinguished.

The 2% of fires that escape suppression are those that are more extreme and much harder to fight. They account for about 98% of the burned area in a typical year.

In other words, trying to put out all wildfires doesn’t reduce the total amount of fire equally – instead, it limits low-intensity fires while extreme fires still burn. This effect is worsened by climate change.

Too much suppression makes fires more severe

In our study, we used a fire modeling simulation to explore the effects of the fire suppression bias and see how they compared to the effects of global warming and fuel accumulation alone.

Fuel accumulation and global warming both inherently make fires more severe. But over thousands of simulated fires, we found that allowing forests to burn only under the very worst conditions increased fire severity by the same amount as more than a century’s worth of fuel accumulation or 21st-century climate change.

The suppression bias also changes the way plants and animals interact with fire.

By removing low-intensity fires, humans may be changing the course of evolution. Without exposure to low-intensity fires, species can lose traits crucial for surviving and recovering from such events.

After extreme fires, landscapes have fewer seed sources and less shade. New seedlings have a harder time becoming established, and for those that do, the hotter and drier conditions reduce their chance of survival.

In contrast, low-intensity fires free up space and resources for new growth, while still retaining living trees and other biological legacies that support seedlings in their vulnerable initial years.

By quickly putting out low-intensity fires and allowing only extreme fires to burn, conventional suppression reduces the opportunities for climate-adapted plants to establish and help ecosystems adjust to changes like global warming.

Suppression makes burned area increase faster

As the climate becomes hotter and drier, more area is burning in wildfires. If suppression removes fire, it should help slow this increase, right?

In fact, we found it does just the opposite.

We found that while conventional suppression led to less total area burning, the yearly burned area increased more than three times faster under conventional suppression than under less aggressive suppression efforts. The amount of area burned doubled every 14 years with conventional fire suppression under simulated climate change, instead of every 44 years when low- and moderate-intensity fires were allowed to burn. That raises concerns for how quickly people and ecosystems will have to adapt to extreme fires in the future.

The fact that the amount of area burned is increasing is undoubtedly driven by climate change. But our study shows that the rate of this increase may also be a result of conventional fire management.

The near total suppression of fires over the last century means that even a little additional fire in a more fire-prone future can create big changes. As climate change continues to fuel more fires, the relative increase in area burned will be much bigger.

This puts more stress on communities as they adapt to increased extreme wildfires, from dealing with more wildfire smoke to even changing where people can live.

A way forward

To address the wildfire crisis, fire managers can be less aggressive in suppressing low- and moderate-intensity fires when it is safe to do so. They can also increase the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning to clear away brush and other fuel for fires.

These low-intensity fires will not only reduce the risk of future extreme fires, but they also will create conditions that favor the establishment of species better suited to the changing climate, thereby helping ecosystems adapt to global warming.

Coexisting with wildfire requires developing technologies and approaches that enable the safe management of wildfires under moderate burning conditions. Our study shows that this may be just as necessary as other interventions, such as reducing the number of fires unintentionally started by human activities and mitigating climate change.

Authorities in California have found a unique way to stop wildfires. They are deploying goats to graze across the state and create a buffer for potential wildfires, according to the BBC. Armed with their appetites, a herd of goats can clear about an acre of brush in a day, thus removing the fuel a wildfire needs to spread. These animals are playing an important role for California that has been at the epicentre of battling wildfires. They have become more frequent, more destructive, and larger, since 1980.

“The reception is overwhelmingly positive wherever we go. It’s a win-win scenario as far as I can tell,” goat herder Michael Choi told the BBC.

He runs a family business that leases goats to city agencies, like the fire department, schools and other clients. They have 700 goats, but recently had to expand their herd to keep up with the demand.

“I think as people get more aware of the idea, and environmental impact, they become more conscious about which methods they want to use for clearing weeds and protecting the landscape from fires. So, there’s definitely a bigger demand, and it’s a growing trend,” said Mr Choi.

A CBC News report said that goats are proving to be ideal for California since they don’t mind the heat, and don’t need anything more than water.

These goats can also graze at any landscape, from grassy flat lands to steep slopes. The outlet also spoke to Mr Choi who said a well-trained guard dog can keep the predators away.

“They eat it pretty much as well as a fire department would require, down to like three inches of brush on the ground. And I mean, in the process, they also treat soil with their fertilizer and their hooves, and get it all nice and ready for the next rain,” he told CBC News.

The BBC said that California faced an “unprecedented” wildfire season in 2021. Last year, the season was “mild” and August this year was cooler and wetter that average. Still, more than a quarter of a million acres have burned, and four people have died.