Climate change - Fires in Greece

This Envisat image taken on 30 August 2007 captures the devastation to Greece’s landscape after blazes burned out of control for a week, killing more than 60 people.

Burned areas are visible as dark brown. Some 190 000 hectares, 10 times the annual average for the past 50 years, were ravaged between Friday and Tuesday, according to the European Commission's European Forest Fire Information System. Since the beginning of 2007, 275 000 hectares have been destroyed by fire.

Quantifying fires is important for the ongoing study of climate because they have a significant impact on global atmospheric pollution, with biomass burning contributing to the global budgets of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide. The 1998 El Niño, for example, helped encourage fires across Borneo which emitted up to 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, equivalent to Europe's entire carbon emissions that year.