Fires in France: 'Agricultural fires, previously overlooked, are now drawing public authorities' attention'

LeMonde

2 days ago

In Istres, located in southern France, it took fifty firefighters to extinguish a grassland fire on Thursday, July 24. The roughly 500 agricultural fires that occur in France each year mostly affect standing cereal crops or the stubble left after harvest.
In July, amid drought caused by the early summer heatwave and lack of rainfall, a series of fires broke out during the harvest in Haute-Loire (45 hectares of wheat burned after a spark from a combine harvester), in Côtes d'Armor, and in Ardèche. This phenomenon often goes unnoticed, even though it poses a risk to harvests and raises concerns about the potential for larger blazes.
Florent Mouillot, an ecologist at the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), along with colleagues Lilian Vallet and Jean-Marc Ourcival, carried out the first exploratory scientific work on this little-studied topic and presented their findings in Coimbra, Portugal, at the 2022 International Conference on Forest Fires.
There are no official statistics and no agency in charge of collecting this information... Together with your two IRD colleagues, you are the first to take an interest in agricultural fires in France. What overall picture have you drawn from this work?