IATE Term of the week: Wildfire

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Horrible wildfires have erased wide spaces of our planet’s lungs burning and perishing people, animals, and trees and spoiling the natural balance in 2018. The importance of these wide beautiful green lands comes out not only from keeping the  Earth as the most beautiful and gorgeous planet in the Milky Way, but it also comes from enabling and saving natural life, giving oxygen, taking carbon dioxide, and providing us with paper, food, wood, work, fuel, shelter, climate regulation, and even enough rain. By the middle of the 20th century, forests were covering about 30% of the Land of the Earth, which had been decreased gradually under the growing pressure of manufacturing and resources consumption to the extent of losing half of the world’s forests during the last fifty years. 13.000 square kilometers were lost just between 2000 and 2012.

Even though people always spend many efforts to renew and extend forests, they were helpless facing the sorrowful, furious forest fires perishing beauty in Greece, Sweden, and the United States of America during the last few weeks. About 70 people are the victims of the fires broken out around Athens in Attika in addition to 118 wounded people. Even though Forest fires in Greece are common in summer and dozens of people, for example, died when fires raged for days across the Peloponnese peninsula in 2007, there are some doubts that some thieves started the fires this time in order to steal the properties of some nearby homes.

In the same context, more than 21 thousand people left their homes in California in the United States to escape what is known as the “Holy Fires” that have been started by Forrest Clark as a revenge against his neighbors. They eliminated more than 19,000 hectares of forest north of San Diego in the state. In contrast, several drought-stricken forest fires intensified across Stockholm (AFP) in Sweden, which destroyed about 9 thousand hectares and evacuating many villages such as Kårböle, Bräcke and Jämtlands län.

Finally, there is no doubt that the increasing Global warming is playing a prominent role in these fires so that several studies have linked the deadly effects of climate changes to the increasing wildfires all around the world.

 

References:

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-climate-wildfires.html

https://www.carbontanzania.com/why-its-important/

http://www.euronews.com/

https://www.bbc.com/news

http://www.france24.com/fr/

https://www.ts3a.com/bi2a/?page_id=2460

– Al-Shayeb, B. ‘’ what is the importance of forests and the factors that lead to their destruction? ‘’ Retrieved from https://www.ts3a.com/bi2a/?page_id=2460


Written by Ahmad Almohammad – terminology Study Visitor at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament (Luxembourg) and a student of the Master Programme in Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts at the University of Luxembourg.  He is an English Teacher and holds his BA in English literature and linguistics. He speaks Arabic and English.