Scotland is beefing up its defences against wildfires as forests and peat bogs across the northern hemisphere go up in flames.

The country has not yet experienced the kind of blazes that have destroyed swathes of Russia, Canada and America in recent years, but fire chiefs believe the same global heating causing natural disasters elsewhere presents a real but smaller threat in the UK.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) is more than doubling the number of stations with firefighters specially trained and equipped to tackle blazes in forests, moors, fields and bogs.

Area commander Bruce Farquharson said: “We are all experiencing the same issues, just in different ways. The impact of climate change is being felt in the northern hemisphere fairly similarly. It is just a question of scale.

“The SFRS is in the midst of introducing its new wildfire strategy, which includes creating a number of different tiers of stations where we have specialist responder stations, of which there will be 10 core and 15 support stations.

“That is 25 stations trained and equipped in a new way to deal with a wildfire. We have currently got about 10 stations that have some sort of wildfire tackling ability.”

Scotland’s wildfire season is earlier in the year than in the hotter, more continental parts of the world’s more. In 2019 it suffered serious large-scale fires in both Moray and Caithness that Continued from Page 1 left a collected scarred landscape covering nearly 12,000 hectares.

There are particular concerns about peat fires, which can involve what Mr Farquharson called “barbaric” interventions, such  as bulldozing trenches down to bedrock to stop fires spreading.

He said: “With a fire that is in  a bush or a tree you can see it. With a fire in peat, it is underground,  it is unseen. And we can have the phenomenon when the fire appears to be extinguished but it is still smouldering away. And it will channel away underground and hit something more combustible, such as a tree root. It is not a coincidence that peat was used in years gone by as a fuel source for crofters “That peat has captured centuries worth of carbon. It is real challenge.”

READ MORE: How Scotland has escaped the global 2021 wildfire crisis... so far

“Essentially, fighting such fires involves getting bulldozers in to scrape back the peat and create a break between the peat and other fuel. It is as barbaric as that.”

 Such work is very different to the kind of firefighting Mr Farquharson and his colleagues do in towns  and cities. They acknowledge they cannot do the job alone.

The new strategy looks at ways firefighters can get help from non-professionals to tackle blazes. Firefighters do sometimes “directly attack” wildfires but most of their work is stopping them spreading, denying the flames new fuel. So  they need local logistical and practical help.  “We are trying to multiply our force by working with rural communities, particularly foresters and gamekeepers, farmers and crofters, to give them an element of training so when we get a larger fire they can assist us in a safe and meaningful way.”  “We want to prevent or mitigate fires when they happen.”

Locals who work the land can have invaluable knowledge that can help contain blazes.

Pilot projects on advanced wildfire expertise are under way at stations in Ullapool, Helensburgh and Dunblane.  This weekend the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk was once again hit by smog thanks to fires raging through forests. Smoke from these blazes has reached America.  Greenpeace has calculated that Russia’s burn scare last year was as big as the United Kingdom, as The Herald on Sunday reported yesterday.

In America, it was as big as Switzerland. In California alone an area the size of Wales burned.  Canada, whose province of British Columbia experienced record temperatures of nearly 50C, say so far this year its burn scar is as big as Northern Ireland.

Scotland’s fuel – its heather, trees and peat – is not nearly as dry as elsewhere in the summer. And temperatures still very rarely top 30C. But firefighters are preparing for warmer and warmer weather  – and the new risks this brings.

Mr Farquharson said: “In other parts of the world, they see fires started by weather. We have never seen that in Scotland yet. But climate change is doing all sorts of funny things so the fact we have not seen it yet does not mean we won’t see it at some point.”  Scottish firefighters are also trying to learn as much as they can from overseas colleagues, tapping into expertise in Catalonia, Denmark and elsewhere.