Vulnerabilities Bulgaria

Forest fire risk in Bulgaria is relatively high. The analysis of the conditions for the occurrence of forest fires was carried out on the basis of data on forest fires between During the period 2000-2021, a total of 12,036 forest fires occurred, or 573 fires on average per year. In 97.1% of the cases, the burned areas are up to 1 ha, 2.5% are between 1 and 100 ha and only 0.4% of the fires burn between 100 and 500 ha. On average, 9475.8 ha of forest areas were burned per year during this period. Most of these fires were caused by humans. Only 2.25% of these forest fires could be related to natural causes. There is a clear relationship between the average duration of heatwaves and the number of forest fires (2).

In Bulgaria, fire-fighters were not prepared for the approximately 1,800 fire breakouts during the 2007 heat wave. The country was forced to declare a state of emergency and seek foreign aid (1).

References

The references below are cited in full in a separate map 'References'. Please click here if you are looking for the full references for Bulgaria.

1. Salzmann (2007), in: Tamer et al. (2008)
2. Nojarov and Nikolova (2022)