Has COVID-19 halted winter-spring wildfires in the Mediterranean? Insights for wildfire science under a pandemic context

Wildfires in the Mediterranean are strongly tied to human activities. Given their particular link with humans, which act as both initiators and suppressors, wildfire hazard is highly sensitive to socioeconomic changes and patterns. Many researchers have prompted the perils of sustaining the current management policy, the so-called ‘total fire exclusion’. This policy, coupled to increasingly fire-prone weather conditions, may lead to more hazardous fires in the mid-long run. Under this framework, the irruption of the COVID-19 pandemic adds to the ongoing situation. Facing the lack of an effective treatment, the only alternative was the implementation of strict lockdown strategies. The virtual halt of the system undoubtedly affected economic and social behavior, triggering cascading effects such as the drop in winter-spring wildfire activity. In this work, we discuss the main impacts, challenges and consequences that wildfire science may experience due to the pandemic situation, and identify potential opportunities for wildfire management. We investigate the recent evolution of burned area (retrieved from the MCD64A1 v006 MODIS product) in the EU Mediterranean region (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece) to ascertain to what extent the 2020 winter-spring season was impacted by the public health response to COVID-19 (curfews and lockdowns). We accounted for weather conditions (characterized using the 6-month Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index; SPEI6) to disregard possible weather effects mediating fire activity. Our results suggest that, under similar drought-related circumstances (SPEI6 ≈ −0.7), the expected burned area in 2020 during the lockdown period in the EU (March–May) would lay somewhere within the range of 38,800 ha ± 18,379 ha. Instead, the affected area stands one order of magnitude below average (3325 ha). This stresses the need of considering the social dimension in the analysis of current and future wildfire impacts in the Mediterranean region.