Ajit Niranjan
speaker
154 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Ajit Niranjan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You like greenery.
It's really good for many, many things.
If you have a really wet winter followed by a very hot and dry summer, which is exactly what we've had, then you have huge, huge amounts of fuel that can be burned.
And scientists talk about it turning forests into tinder boxes.
I think one scientist this morning in Spain said, we're entering the era of fires that we cannot extinguish.
And that's because when these little fires spark up, and these happen for many reasons, natural causes, lightning strikes, arsonists, people being careless with the campfires, and so on.
when these fires spark and you get this like small flame, they can spread and morph into these gigantic blazes because there is just more fuel that can be eaten up.
No, I mean, it's a very big question, but it is one that thankfully scientists have laid out really clearly for us.
And it should be said they have been shouting at the top of their voices for well over a decade about this stuff.
To start with, maybe the most obvious solution, burning fewer fossil fuels would mean that we heat the planet less.
It also comes with all the benefits of meaning we are less likely to die from all the air pollution and all the toxic fumes that we're breathing in.
That's kind of the background change that would need to happen to prevent this increase in severe fire weather that's turning southern Europe into a real hotspot for wildfires.
Beyond that, making sure that we prevent fires from spreading is possibly the single solution I've heard pushed the most by scientists, particularly in Spain and southern France.
And that means anything from creating fire breaks, so consciously managing the land in a way that whether you're a homeowner who's on the edge of a field, that you just ensure that you've got a path that doesn't have any vegetation between your property and the green space.
But of course, we're seeing fires that have got to an extent that means that such measures don't necessarily do much anymore because you've got these burning embers that spread across the landscape, carried by the wind, particularly when you've got pine trees.
I spoke to firefighters in Croatia who've made the point that when you've got these
pine forests which have been planted across Europe, southern Europe, when they go up in flames, the pine cones act like what one of them described to me as grenades because they catch fire and they explode and they send these little bits of burning particles.
And that means they can cross roads, they can cross rivers, they can cross these natural breaks that in theory should be preventing a fire from getting from one place to another.
The authorities in both countries, and this is common in areas where extreme weather events are happening, they don't want to put people off from coming, partly because these are significant industries for their economy.
Tourism is a sector that does bring in a lot of money.
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