Preserving vanishing French vineyards to check forest fires

France’s biggest forest fire in the south-east of the country on the Mediterranean coast has been brought under control, but it has not yet been extinguished, according to prefect of Aude, Christian Pouget, where the summer fire has destroyed 17,000 hectares of forest land, about 42,000 acres.

He said, “The fire will not be declared extinguished for several days. There is still a lot of work to be done.” Prime Minister Francois Bayrou remarked after visiting the disaster hit province that it was a “catastrophe on an unprecedented scale”, and went on to observe, “What is happening today is linked to global warming and linked to drought.”

Europe, specially the southern part, including south of France, Spain and Portugal, has been facing high temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius. The diminished rainfall has created drought conditions. It is the dryness of the forest area that has made it vulnerable to forest fires, which are a seasonal feature in this part of Europe.

There is however the additional factor that climate change and rising global temperatures had affected Europe more than many parts of the world. It is the fastest warming continent since 1980, with temperatures increasing at double the average temperatures of the rest of the world, according to European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Pouget said that 2,000 firemen were deployed to fight the forest fire. A 65-year-old woman died because she did not vacate her home, and 13 people were hurt, 11 of them firefighters, and hundreds of homes were destroyed. According to Environment Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher this was the largest fire in France since 1949.

The reduced rainfall in the south of France has led to the withering away of the vineyards, and it has made the forest fires more destructive than ever. They spread without any obstacle. The vineyards served as a brake, but the brake has crumbled because of the drought that has ravaged them. Bayrou said, “It’s very striking that everywhere where there were vineyards, the fire was for most part stopped.”

There are complex reasons for the loss of vineyards. The French government has been paying 4,000 euros per hectare to the wine-growers to give up the vines to avoid excess supply as drinking habits change. In the place of vines, the farmers were asked to grow olives and pistachios. Farmers say that there is no alternative to the parched hillsides once sheep farming disappeared. It is indeed a complex story of economic compulsions combined with climate change.

The farmers in France, and in Europe in general, have their own list of grievances even as they are affected by the rising temperatures and the increasing extreme weather events. The general tendency of governments and policy-makers has been to deal with the agriculture crisis and the climate crisis separately. If the vineyards are to be stripped bare because the government is worried about the excess supply of wine, and this is isolated from the strategy to combat climate change, then it is inevitable that agricultural and climate disasters would be the result.

Preserving French vineyards could be a better way of checking forest fires, and reducing the temperatures in general could help increase precipitation and rainfall, and in turn help the vineyards to flourish.

There is much talk about holistic policy-making but it is rarely put in practice. It is now a well-established fact that it is the rising temperatures that are causing the increased forest fires. And not enough is being done to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which would help curbing the rising temperatures. There is need for vineyards and grasslands to feed sheep, which need mild rainfall.