PARIS (AP) — History keeps repeating itself in the smoldering forests of southwest France, now ash-covered and charred.Devastated by previous blazes in 2022 and 1949, when 82 people died, the largest human-made woodland in Western Europe has again been ravaged by wildfires which burned an area four times the size of Paris. The forests of Les Landes — covering 10,000 square kilometers (3,860 square miles) — was created in the 19th century for timber and resin production. They comprise endless rows of pines in neat, close lines, which works against them in a wildfire, with flames jumping easily from one tree to another.Blazes loom as a growing danger for the timberland because Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent. But climate change isn’t its sole vulnerability, experts say. They also point to the very nature of such industrial plantation, whose origins date back to the Second French Empire.
The latest disaster is forcing a rethink in France about how to better prepare and manage forest expanses to cope with hotter, drier, more fire-prone conditions made worse by human-caused climate change — from the burning of coal, oil and gas.President Emmanuel Macron said a different kind of forest should be replanted.“The structural conditions created by climate change, under which we will have to live, have changed,” he said. “So has the pressure from housing and tourism.”
