mfesharne

They can't come down on anyone until about mid March at the earliest this year but it could well be that landowners know what's coming if they don't cut before then.

EMR

There are a number of posters warning of the dangers of fire and not clearing land.
As suggested the message is finally being driven home.

Ingles

As usual in PT ,nothing is as straight forward as it should be

https://algarvedailynews.com/news/13...t-cleaning-law

liveaboard

I have a little forest that abuts the main road, but doesn't touch anything else; I wait to hear if they'll make me cut it.
Those rules with all the ifs and whens are confusing to me.

mfesharne

My guess is they won't enforce it....... The National Govt seem to have put the responsibility firmly on the local Govt who don't have the money to do it.

Nor are the land ownership records anywhere near up to date so the owners can't be traced in many cases.

FWIW, on a road the firebreak is supposed to be 10m from roadside verge to tree canopy but in my area at least, it's not even 10 inches in the vast majority of places.

It really is a super mega bugly stuff up!

liveaboard

I keep the brush cleared but I won't cut my trees unless they make me do so.
Some of the pines overhang the road.

Pulaski

In a world where many of the climatic and topographylical ills (soil erosion, wind damage, water purity/ cleanliness, stormwater run-off, drainage and flooding, CO2 build up, surface heating of the earth, among others) can be attributed to some degree to deforestation, I can't imagine ever wanting to live in a country where deforestation is the government's official policy.

mfesharne

It's not about deforestation......... it's about keeping people alive.

There's no suggestion every tree in the country be felled just those ones that endanger life and/or make escape roads such as the N236-1 impassable.

Look at the pic in the link below (taken incidentally within 5 minutes drive of my home) & then tell me again why roadside trees & firebreaks around houses shouldn't be cut & maintained!

If I had my way, owners of those trees would be prosecuted for manslaughter.

https://www.google.pt/search?q=pedro...1ryrYzKfy4rEM:

mfesharne

If I sound bitter........ it's because I damn well am!

11 people which is 33% of the permanent population died in my village & 50+ more within 5km of it to say nothing of a large number of livestock including all of my own & countless wild animals........ And all because people didn't want to cut their trees to the legal firebreak limits!

EMR

You have no need to modify your views.
We have seen large fires from a distance.
Experienced smoke and debris blowing over US for hours.
It is only down to luck that the forested areas did not suffer in the same terrible way that you have .
There is a huge difference between land management and deforestation.

Red Eric

It's not and the government is putting a lot of money into reforestation.

There's also a new initiative by the main environmental NGO to persuade municipal authorities - of which there are over 100 in Portugal - to commit to planting 1 million native trees each in their territories during the next 5 years.

liveaboard

One hand pulls right, the other pulls left...
The new rules make sense in areas of continuous large forest; on the other hand, there are lots of areas that only have few trees, or patches of forest with large accessible spaces between them.
A 10 meter [or larger] roadside exclusion zone where there is practically no danger of catastrophic fire doesn't make sense.
Not to me anyway.

I don't know about other parts of Portugal, but where I live [a 'national nature park'] all the ground is privately owned. Even many of the roads are [theoretically] on private land. Private land right through the dunes, down the cliffs, to the high tide line.
So if you want to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, you'll need permission from thousands of landowners, or the land will have to be appropriated.
Yes, I know there is some public land somewhere. I'm sure someone will want to plant trees on it.

mfesharne

It has nothing to do with "continuous large forests" & everything to do with preserving lives, homes & livelihoods & FAR better some lose money than the innocent lose EVERYTHING including their own lives.

"Practically no danger"?

Really?

Look at the damn pictures FFS.

https://www.google.pt/search?q=pedro...w=1366&bih=654

Red Eric

I'm pretty certain liveaboard was saying a 10 meter tree-free zone alongside all roads doesn't make sense as a hard and fast rule, as there are areas where there is low risk of fire spreading, as opposed to saying that all roadsides present practically no fire risk

Pulaski

If you plant trees in a regular two-dimensional grid every 10 metres (which is too close together for most mature trees) over a square kilometer, you would plant 10,000 trees. To Therefore to plant a million trees would take 100sqkm.

You say there are over 100 municipalities in Portugal, and Portugal has a land area of about 91,000 sqkm, so the average municipality is less than 910sqkm, and they're supposed to find 100sqkm, or more than 10% of their land area on average to plant trees?

Is that even vaguely realistic? ..... Or is the initiative just empty words from a politician?

Or are they just going to cram in saplings a couple of metres apart knowing full well that 90% of them will die or have to be weeded out within a few years?

I any case, I wonder how much land you are left with if you take the 91,000 sqkm area of Portugal and subtract developed land and surrounding fire breaks, roads and related fire breaks, agricultural land, land that is already forested, ..... is there enough land left in Portugal to plant 100 million trees?