The wildfire in Portugal became out of control due to unnatural Eucalyptus trees in the area; an Australian tree that is extremely flammable!
If you’ve been watching or reading eh news in the last week, you’ve probably come across a few mentions of the wildfire that roamed in Portugal. It claimed 61 human lives, and probably did a lot of damage to the ecosystem in the area, and I want to use this post to talk about why bad forestry decisions lead to the fire getting totally out of control.
The eucalyptus trees (Eucalyptus globulus) were planted in Portugal as far back as 1866, where an estimated 35,000 plants were planted. The original intent was to prevent erosion, but this did not work out well, but the eucalyptus trees turned out to be profitable to have for selling pulp to the paper industry, and Portugal continued to keep planting these foreign trees.
The eucalyptus tree industry kept going into modern time, despite objections from environmentalists. The Portuguese government said they wanted to go back to using native trees for their lumber, but despite this no real efforts have been made. At this point everyone knew of the flammability of eucalyptus, as well as all the ecological damage it was doing, but being greedy was most likely what stopped anyone from taking action. The income from the eucalyptus products were needed, and they kept having them despite all the problems.
A single eucalyptus tree. Image by Forest & Kim Starr, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
The devastating effects of having eucalyptus trees
It is a well-known fact that eucalyptus trees are extremely flammable, and are therefore usually grown in tightly regulated areas to prevent wildfires. However, this was not the fact in Portugal, and the forest there ended up being a mix of eucalyptus and pine, which turned out to be a disaster once the wildfire started last week. The fire would fore sure not be as devastating if the affected area only had native trees, but the eucalyptuses in the area made sure the fire spread a lot faster and grow bigger than it would originally have been able to.
This goes to show that introducing non-native species into ecosystems can have fatal consequences. Luckily we won’t see 61 deaths each time an invasive species gets out of control, but it happened this time. I hope this is a wake-up call for the Portuguese government, and hopefully this will make them reevaluate this ecological disaster!
That is the consequence when a nation has leaders who put their particular interests before the interests of the nation.
They are leaders who only seek to enrich themselves without caring about the damage they do and this because of a lack of awareness
Yep, that's true, and sadly we see it all around the world.
But this happens through ignorance and an excess of egoism that affects the welfare of the majority of the population that is affected by its way of acting.
When it is going to approve a certain project must study or feasibility, the negative effects to our ecositema. And the most painful and strong is that a real solution to this problem is not yet seen.
Did not know that. Good info. Learning something random and new every day
I'm glad you learned something new ;) Thanks for the comment!
Update: 64 death and more than 200 injured people.
There is more than one factor influencing this. I wish eucalyptus was the only cause. It's true that we have a lot of Eucalyptus. Way more than would be expected regarding the territory suitability for other species.
Eucalyptus is more flamable than our native species, for sure, and that is a problem in case of fire. However, I'd say the presence of eucalyptus is probably a bigger problem for biodiversity.
It what wildfires are concerned, the professionally managed exploitations do not burn that much, even if they have plenty of eucalyputs. This should ring a bell. (They have money enough to invest in prevention and even have professional firefighters working for them.)
Concerning native species:
Portugal is known for being the worlds' biggest cork producer. In fact, Cork oak (and the also important Holm oak) are dying like never before. There is a fungus, there is an insect, there are droughts. All of this is true. But the places with less mortality and with more regeneration are in professionally managed exploitations. This should ring the same bell as before :)
You can see it all over the world - in South America it's also depleting the soil and wreaking havoc :s
Aw, yeah, unfortunately this tree has been imported to most of the world :(
Oh, this is so sad. So sorry.
Excellent article. I knew of Eucalyptus' medicinal properties, but I had never heard of it's worrying downsides for Portugal's forests. Very informative, thank you for taking the time to share this with us. Resteeming!
Thanks for the resteem! I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed this information ;)
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I've traveled around Portugal, and because I had read about how hazardous they were, I was quite shocked by how many there were.