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!