There have been 222 forest fire breakouts in Morocco since the year 2023 began, consuming 3,900 hectares across various parts of the country, according to the National Agency for Water and Forests (ANEF) on Tuesday.
On the other hand, Mohamed Sadiki, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, Rural Development, Water and Forests, praised the capabilities that Morocco has in fighting fires and the effective coordination between all those departments involved in confronting them, stressing that the Kingdom records 6 fires per day.
In a speech, he delivered at a meeting of the Infrastructure, Energy, Minerals, and Environment Committee in the House of Representatives, today, he said that “for nearly a month now, not a day goes by without recording 5 to 6 fires at the level of several regions, and there is no talk about them.”
He added that “the intervention is very important, and we have a permanent system that includes monitoring and monitoring, and its interventions are effective and all partners contribute to it, including the Ministry of Interior,” considering that the approved coordination to confront fires is the best operational coordination system.
The agency is “improving the risk prediction system using artificial intelligence and big data systems, which is the system that matches vegetation data, landscape, weather conditions, and climatic data,” according to Abderahim Houmi, General Director of the Agency.
The same government official recorded the presence of mobilized capabilities supervised by a special center, highlighting that “statistics and recorded numbers show that the largest fire this year was in Islan, destroying 2,000 hectares.”
The damaged area in 2022 was unusual given that the annual average over the previous ten years is 3,350 hectares.
35% of the afflicted regions are leafy (green oak, cork oak, and eucalyptus), 35% are not wooded (secondary types, allies, and herbs), and 30% are conifers (cedar, juniper, and pine), according to the Director General.
Burned forests are not lost forests, according to Houmi, who added that “works for reforestation, processing, and rehabilitation are scheduled right away after the fire.”
The Minister added, “This year, the fires were in uninhabited places, unlike last year, when the fires in the province of Larache were in populated places.”
Morocco records the lowest rate of damaged areas at 0.04%, with a total of 22,800 hectares of forests burning in 2022, as opposed to 290,000 hectares in Spain, where the damage rate is 1.4%, and 1.0% in Algeria, where a total of 47,00 hectares of forests burned in 2022.
In his speech to the deputies, Sadiki referred to the fires known to a group of regions in the world, such as Greece, which “lives for weeks at its rhythm, and Canada and the fires that devoured millions of hectares, and the neighbors and what happened two days ago,” in reference to the fires facing Algeria that led to the death of 34 people.
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