By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Aug 12 2005 (IPS)

When fires break out in southern Europe in the hot summer months, the highest price is paid by Portugal, where the total forest area that has gone up in flames is 24 times greater than that of France, four times that of Spain and three times that of Greece and Italy.

That was the conclusion reached by a European Union (EU) report released this week in Brussels that pays special attention to Portugal, the only European country that has seen the average annual amount of forests destroyed by fire increase in the last 25 years.

The statistics presented Wednesday by the European Commission’s European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), a network with representatives from 19 countries, indicate that from Jan. 1 to Jul. 31, Portugal accounted for 60 percent of the forest area destroyed by fires in the five Mediterranean countries studied.

The report also notes that the total forest area that was burnt in Portugal this year was twice that of neighbouring Spain, a country that is 5.6 times larger than Portugal and is facing the same severe drought.

In the first week of August, temperatures soared to 45 degrees celsius in the southern part of the Iberian peninsula and to 43 degrees in central Portugal. Combined with the drought, the unusually high temperatures triggered the worst fires so far this year, which devastated several villages in the Serra da Estrela Natural Park.

Portugal has the worst record in fighting forest fires in the EU, and is the only member of the bloc where a larger forest area was destroyed by flames in 2004 than the annual average since 1980, says the European Commission report.

The analysis of the progress made in fighting forest fires indicates that in Italy and Greece, the total area that went up in flames in 2004 was around half the average of the last 25 years, while France reduced the total by nearly two-thirds and Spain by 30 percent.

In 2004, Portugal accounted for 37 percent of the total area burnt by fires, while Spain – which covers 85 percent of the Iberian peninsula – accounted for 39 percent, Italy 17 percent, France four percent, and Greece three percent.

"Portugal has seven time more fires per 1,000 hectares than Spain, 20 times more than France, seven times more than Italy and 22 times more than Greece," said the League for the Protection of Nature (LPN), Portugal’s oldest environmental organisation, referring to the European Commission study.

In the last five years, Portugal lost 25 percent of its forest area to fires, which consumed 424,000 hectares in 2003 and 131,000 hectares last year.

According to Portuguese government figures, between Jan. 1 and Jul. 31, fires destroyed more than 70,000 hectares, causing economic damages equivalent to 1.5 percent of Portugal’s gross domestic product (GDP) of 130 billion euros (160.6 billion dollars).

The European Commission report put the total surface area destroyed by fires in Portugal in that period at around 100,000 hectares.

But on Thursday, Portuguese Interior Minister Antonio Costa himself admitted to a parliamentary investigation commission that as of Wednesday night, a total of 119,000 hectares had been destroyed so far this year.

That contrasts sharply with the figures provided up to now by the DGRF, the government’s forestry resources department, which reported that only 68,166 hectares have gone up in smoke since January.

The difference would appear to lie in the measuring methods used. While EFFIS relies on satellite images that are analysed on a daily basis, the DGRF makes an assessment of the total area destroyed by fire through visits on the ground, which delays processing of the data.

Between early 2001 and last July, Portugal lost 820,000 of its total 3.4 hectares of forest cover.

The enormous number of forest fires in Portugal is largely caused by a lack of awareness among the population and the government’s failure to effectively combat negligence, according to LPN, which was founded as a non-profit organisation in 1948.

"The climate, the quantity of ignitable fuel in the forests and shortcomings in the fire detection and fighting system are no justification for the differences between Portugal and the rest of Europe," stated the NGO, which pointed out that the other countries cited in the European Commission report "have far greater forested areas and populations."

LPN maintains that awareness-raising efforts are needed in order to prevent high risk activities, like the burning of agricultural waste products. "Very little has been done in the field of consciousness-raising," said the environmental group in a statement.

Duarte Caldeira, head of the League of Portuguese Firefighters, told the press Thursday that "the rest of the countries (included in the study) learned from their own errors and did not get lost in sterile debate."

Portugal, by contrast, "did exactly the opposite, using the problem of fires as a political weapon for attacking those who are united by a lack of courage to enforce existing legislation," Caldeira complained.

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