Wildfires are on the rise in the UK, but scientists have been developing innovative ways of preventing them, using the power of nature
The wildfire events in Europe, Canada and Hawaii – and, prior to that, other US states and Australia – may dominate the headlines, yet wildfire is an issue faced by the UK, too.
Before the soggy affair that was July and August 2023, a spell of hot weather meant wildfires were very much on our national agenda. In June, firefighters tackled a wildfire the size of 300 football pitches
in woodland on Rhigos Mountain in South Wales.
Around the same time, a nearly 2km-long patch of moor and woodland just south of Inverness went up in flames. A few days later, yet another wildfire was burning on Marsden Moor in West Yorkshire, the eighth in the area since February.
These are just a few of the wildfire events that have taken place in this country this summer, and there will be more in summers to come, each the result of action by humans, whether careless or, more likely, deliberate. A smouldering cigarette butt tossed into the undergrowth. A spark from a barbecue. An act of arson motivated by who knows what.
Wildfires and the environment
There are places in the world where wildfire is beneficial to ecosystems. In the boreal forests of Russia and Canada, for example, or the Australian bush, where lightning is a common source of ignition, wildfire has historically been part of a regular cycle of destruction and renewal, critical when it comes to maintaining biodiversity in a given environment. In the UK, however, where we have no so-called ‘natural ignitions’ from lightning, it’s a different story.
The consequences for wildlife vary from place to place, but as a general rule, wildfires in this country have a devastating effect on species up and down the food chain. They strip out vegetation, kill all manner of animals that can’t flee fast enough, and destroy birds’ nests. After an upland fire, the razed ground favours particular types of vegetation, with species such as purple moor-grass creating a monoculture that both reduces biodiversity and makes the landscape more flammable.
Why are wildfires becoming more common in the UK?
Wildfires are not a new phenomenon in the UK but they are becoming more frequent, with wildfire season extending as a result of climate change. As Stefan Doerr, director of the Centre for Wildfire Research at Swansea University, explains: “The key factors in fire weather are how long it’s been dry. In the UK, all we need is a week or two of dry weather to allow wildfires, even when it’s cold. When you then add high temperatures that suck the rest of the moisture out of the vegetation, ignitions turn even more readily into large wildfires.”
Changes in land use are also a factor, with land that was previously grazed by livestock becoming overgrown as traditional agriculture has given way to intensive modern farming practices. “What used to be a low flammability landscape – short grass, relatively little bracken, relatively little gorse, because it was grazed and trampled – is now more or less abandoned,” says Doerr.
With global temperatures on the rise and demographic changes likely to lead to further land abandonment in the coming years, the outlook is a decidedly worrying one for wildfire watchers.
What can we do to try and prevent wildfires from taking place?
Fortunately, conservation scientists have a few tricks up their sleeves with the potential to mitigate these destructive events. By drawing on traditional land management practices and the power of nature itself, these innovative approaches may be able to stop wildfires before they start.
One place where these new techniques are at work is Howth, an outer suburb of Dublin where the gorse-covered terrain goes up in flames every spring. Inspired by the fact that, until the 1950s, this landscape was grazed by goats, in 2021 Fingal County Council launched a three-year project to reintroduce grazing as a wildfire mitigation measure, working with the Old Irish Goat Society (OIGS).
“It’s unspoiled heathland,” says Melissa Jeuken, the project’s full-time goat herd. “It’s rocky, dry, uneven – there’s so much vegetation. So it’s real goat country and this will be the most suitable animal to manage this landscape again.”
While most of the goats browse existing firebreaks [open land created in order to stop a fire from spreading], the mature bucks “can access more rugged sites,” says Jeuken.
“So if there are new firebreaks to be created, there’s potential to utilise animal power rather than machinery.”
There are downsides, though. If left to roam, goats will completely denude an area, leaving space for flammable grasses to grow. The Howth project mitigates these risks by using ‘virtual fencing’ – GPS collars programmed by Jeuken to limit the animals’ movement to a particular area. When a goat approaches the boundary line, the collar sounds an alarm that rises in pitch the longer the goat stays there, and stops as soon as it turns away. After 20 seconds, the animal receives an electrical pulse of 1.2 joule – strong enough to let them know they can’t go any further but not to cause any pain. Once an area is deemed sufficiently browsed, Jeuken simply walks her charges to a new spot and re-programmes the collars.
At the end of this project, Sean Carolan, director of OIGS, would like to see vegetation surveys to assess the full impacts of the goats, with a view to eventually using the technique in other areas at risk from wildfires.
“To be a successful pilot, it needs to maintain firebreaks,” he explains. “These will allow the fire service to control the fires relatively easily. You would like to think that the goats could eventually prevent the occurrence of wildfires.”
Christopher Johnson, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Tasmania, who has published papers on this subject, agrees that data will be key in figuring out where and when grazing might be useful as a fire mitigation measure. “We need knowledge that’s specific to species and locations, and that allows us to predict effects. We need more projects like this one with a willingness to scrutinise what they’re doing, using proper methods.”
Virtual fencing, like that used in Howth, could be an effective addition to the wildfire-prevention toolbox on the National Trust’s Marsden Moor Estate. So believes Kate Divey-Matthews, a resilient landscapes project officer. “You might have a large expanse of moorland that’s had a fire on it, so you really would like the sheep or cattle to graze and help control the fresh moor grass,” she explains. “But actually there’s also a reservoir with some nice grass around it and they’re just going to go there.” The virtual fences, then, will keep the animals where they will be most effective.
But with the costs of this technology still prohibitively high, grazing is still used in a fairly limited way at Marsden. The current emphasis instead is on cutting firebreaks in the moor grass over the autumn and winter so there’s less of it the following spring. “You’re trying to restrict how far [the fire] can go and help the fire service,” says Divey-Matthews.
The challenge, she explains, is that cutting can only take place once bird-nesting season is over and before the ground is too waterlogged for the National Trust’s all-terrain vehicle. There are other logistical implications too: the ranger team at Marsden has limited time for cutting the grass.
This is why the team is looking to longer-term solutions. Working with Moors for the Future Partnership (MFP), a conservation organisation focusing on the Peak District and South Pennine moors, the National Trust has been planting sphagnum moss in order to reinstate what’s known as blanket bog, a wet peatland habitat dominated by these moisture-retaining plants.
Sphagnum helps mitigate wildfires in two ways. First, it reduces the fuel load in the landscape, because flammable plants such as moor grass are less likely to grow in wet conditions. Second, the peat itself is less likely to burn when wet, making any wildfires less damaging than if the ground is dry.
“If you have a sphagnum moorland that burns once in a relatively dry summer, but where the subsurface is still wet, the damage is very limited and it will recover very quickly,” explains Doerr. “Rewetting our peatlands is essential.”
That’s easier said than done, however. Before you can put back the sphagnum, you need to make sure the conditions are right. On the most degraded areas of upland that MFP works on, that means first treating the soil to make it less acidic, then sowing fast-growing grasses and other moorland plant species to stabilise the soil. Only then will the water table be high enough to support sphagnum. Plus, the planting itself is time-consuming and costly – sphagnum plugs must be pushed into the peat by hand – and once the plugs are in the ground, the mosses only grow a few centimetres a year.
That’s too slow to be able to use sphagnum planting in isolation, says Chris Dean, partnership manager at MFP. “It’s going to take a little while to get the resilience of these places up, a few decades perhaps, and in that time we’ve got climate change running riot and huge potential for wildfires. So, we probably need to do quite a lot of vegetation management work in targeted places where we have a lot of people [causing wildfires].”
Cutting firebreaks may be the most common vegetation management method in the Peak District but, in other upland areas, land managers prefer another technique: prescribed burning, where areas of vegetation are deliberately burned under particular conditions. A much more controversial way of managing vegetation, because of both the public’s instinctive aversion to fire and the technique’s long association with driven grouse shooting, it’s available only under licence, and is restricted to the cooler, wetter months of October to mid-April to ensure the fires are kept under control and do not negatively impact habitat, wildlife and local air quality.
“Some local authorities are understanding that fire, which has been used in the landscape for a long time, can help with future fire risk,” says Doerr. “It’s relatively new for the UK.”
Siân Whitehead, a senior scientist specialising in uplands at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, agrees. “If the burn is managed appropriately and the vegetation that’s being burned is at the right stage, there can be a positive effect.”
However, Whitehead stresses that – as is the case with other, notably less risky conservation measures – “every site is different. You have to look at individual sites, their past management and their current conditions. There are some examples of bad practice where prescribed burns should never have happened.”
Nonetheless, Whitehead believes prescribed burning should remain in the toolbox, and that there should be more open-mindedness about its use – not least because by restricting its use to the extent that we do in this country, we risk losing the skills and equipment that ensure that prescribed burns can continue to take place safely in the future.
“In the past, there have been instances when the fire service have called on local land managers to go out and help contain wildfires,” explains Whitehead. “In the future, they may not be able to call on those workers because they don’t have the equipment or the skills.”
None of these measures – prescribed burning, cutting, grazing or sphagnum planting – is a silver bullet. Yet along with awareness campaigns to educate the public about how to avoid causing ignitions, they can each play a role in helping to mitigate the potential damage of wildfires both in this country and around the world. One thing’s for sure, as climate change makes our world more flammable, we will need all the help we can get.
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