The water was likely redirected for agricultural purposes and the farmers won't/can't surrender it on top of drought, if it's anything like the US. Would be real cool if we could make investments like this though.
This is another point that is overlooked. If you transform a landscape, moving the water through quickly or whatever, preventing the natural action (eg deeply drenching the ground) perhaps you create a high risk of a fire where the ground gets very hot, where that wasn't a possibility before.
Depends on the time scale, I guess? We are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. So the norm, right now, is that later there will be fewer animals and insects.
In Europe, we've lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, something like that? That was completely unrelated to climate change. I guess climate change is just coming to help with the remaining 20%.
Might well be. You understand that forest fires are actually natural, and this forest actually isn't, and so the suggestion is at least not automatically invalid.
> Some efforts have begun to diversify the Landes forest and to maintain or promote deciduous trees, particularly along the edges of plots. The major difficulty, according to foresters, is that very few species are able to grow in this region, where the sandy soil is very poor and very acidic (it is one of the poorest soils in Europe). Foresters describe the maritime pine as a "miracle species" in this regard.
> While other species can still grow, it is much more slowly and with greater difficulty. Radically transforming this vast forest, currently 80% dominated by maritime pines, therefore seems complicated, and there is also a significant economic stake involved in timber production in the region.
I thought pine trees were particularly acidic or their pine needles are, which is why the floor of pine forests is not very diverse, just large blankets of dead needles.
The second part is right though, these are important but very long term efforts worldwide which is why we need to start doing something now. A few percent difference could still be the difference between a fire and not a fire or between new wildlife moving there or not.
Burning the pine is how you end with a soil composed of 90% sand. Respecting the slow building of fertile soil is basic. There are several decicuous trees able to grow in very acid soils. Not so much in acid, plus sandy, plus salty.
A fact that is not being noticed is that pine trees forests evolve naturally to substitute the pines with a bigger mix of species so if you plant a pine monoculture you need to manage it to keep the monoculture. This forest evolution happens for free by natural means unless:
Sheep enter the forest or...
Weather is very cold or very hot or...
Soil is really poor, because wildfires.
Keep controlled this variables for a generation and the flammable monoculture problem will fix itself. All forests evolve to be eventually less flammable, but they need time to do this.
Probably a dozen reasons why we cannot that I am unaware of, but from my arm chair it looks good.