Var, Siberia, California, Australia, Greece and Italy all these regions have one thing in common. All of them were victims of forest fires on an unprecedented scale. Climate change has consequences for the development of forest fires.
Each year, more than 30 million hectares, or 10 times the surface of Belgium, go up in flames. At the same time, 8 billion tons of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. This corresponds to the volume of emissions from the transport sector globally.
However, these greenhouse gas emissions are not always accounted for in humanity’s global carbon footprint, because they are of natural origin. They are, therefore, added to the 41 billion tons already emitted by human activity.
However, to fight forest fires, more and more resources are needed. Water Bombers like the Canadairs, must intervene as soon as possible, as soon as the fire starts. That’s when they are most effective. If they intervene later, the pilots must fly very low, sometimes down a hillside, to attack the fire at its root. Unfortunately, accidents are not uncommon, despite the exceptional skills of these pilots.
Faced with the growing threat of forest fires, control methods are being modernized. In France, the Keppair Project aims to transform an Airbus into a water bomber. Result: This new device could release up to 40,000 liters of water in each of its passages.
New concepts are also emerging, such as the MIKA project. It consists of transporting large drones on board A400M type cargo planes. Each loaded with 3,000 liters of product, they are launched into the area, piloted from the ground or autonomously, to fight the fire more effectively.
These drones are programmed to return to base automatically as soon as your product is released. In this way, continuous rotation is guaranteed for good fire performance. Until now, the instrument that allows us to combine large amounts of water and precision has been lacking.
Yann Barbaux, former Airbus director of innovation
In a single pass, 5 to 6 drones are launched and can extinguish between 100 and 200 meters of fire per minute. In an hour, the device can extinguish a fire in 3 to 8 km.
The cost of this innovation is estimated at 35 billion euros. This amounts, for example, to a quarter of the budget of 150 billion euros implemented for the construction of the International Space Station. This project, if taken into account by international cooperation, as the “blue helmets” endowed with significant resources, would benefit all humanity.
“If we reduce this budget to the ton of CO2 currently negotiated at 6 dollars, whereas today reforestation, a consequence of fires, costs around 50 dollars, this solution is economically and ecologically very interesting”, adds Yann Barbaux
And, above all, these new solutions, which would make it possible to limit the scale of fires, would help to preserve flora and fauna, which pay a high price, not to mention material and human damage.