Category Archives: Civio

Translated story: The share of Europe’s territory at high risk of fire has doubled in the last 50 years

Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy come up every year when we talk about major forest fires. You don’t have to look far back to remember catastrophes such as the fire in Rhodes, Greece, last July, that displaced 30,000 people. Or the Pedrógão Grande fire in 2017, in Portugal, that killed 66 people. The Mediterranean is a hot spot for climate change, and a hot spot for forest fires.

An increasing number of European countries are experiencing very high or extreme forest fire risk. This is a new problem for some of them. In recent years, forest fires have also become more severe in central, eastern and northern European countries. 2018 was a particularly bad year for Sweden. Sweden experienced very high fire weather risk, on average, in 49% of its territory that year, and extreme risk, the highest level, in 14% of its territory. This was a record for the last five decades. That same year, a record number of hectares burned across the country, far more than had burned in any year during the previous decade.

Europe now has twice as much territory at very high or extreme fire weather risk as it did in 1971: 40 percent, up from 20 percent. This means that populations that were not previously at high risk – or at all – are now at high risk of enduring a wildfire. This index, the fire weather index, measures the weather conditions that enable a fire to spread. It incorporates humidity, wind, temperature and precipitation, but does not include other very important variables such as vegetation. To know the real fire danger, fire weather risk is only one part: “Part of it depends on the weather, part of it depends on the fuel and its flammability, which also depends on its moisture content,” says Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Continue reading Translated story: The share of Europe’s territory at high risk of fire has doubled in the last 50 years

Translated story: Transparency delayed is not transparency at all: Italy, Germany and Spain allow slowest replies to public information requests

Public entities in ItalyGermany and Spain have one calendar month to respond to requests for access to public information. They do not even always meet this deadline, which is the longest of the countries examined in a Civio-led investigation by members of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJnet).

At the other extreme is Slovakia, which grants its authorities only eight working days, excluding weekends and public holidays. PolandPortugalCroatia and the Czech Republic, allow almost half a month to respond to requests made through their transparency lawsSlovenia and Greece allow 20 working days, which places them almost at the bottom of the countries analysed.

What the ten European countries surveyed do share is a general lack of compliance with transparency rules. “The law is good. The problem is its implementation,” says Croatian journalist Dijana Pribačić Jurić of H-Alter“We have had cases where, after a lengthy administrative procedure, we received information on our journalistic requests only after two to three years, when they are no longer relevant in a journalistic sense,” adds Toni Gabrić, editor in chief of the same media outlet. The same happens in Spain, Portugal and Greece, according to sources interviewed by Civio.

Continue reading Translated story: Transparency delayed is not transparency at all: Italy, Germany and Spain allow slowest replies to public information requests

Translated story: Europe fights the monkeypox outbreak with unequal defences

The sudden appearance of monkeypox outside its endemic regions, in Central and West Africa, surprised the world. Although it was not the first time the virus had broken out elsewhere, the scale of the current health crisis is unprecedented. From the beginning of May to the middle of July, at least 7,665 cases have been reported in the European Union (EU), according to figures compiled by Civio, which is one thousand more cases than the WHO reportsIt is the largest outbreak of this virus ever seen in Europe, where few countries were well-prepared.

“No one expected transmission within Europe or the United States, without [a patient] having travelled or their partner or friend having travelled,” says Mar Faraco, president of the Spanish Association of Foreign Health Doctors. For the moment, the most affected countries in the EU are Spain (2,895 cases), Germany (1,859), France (912), the Netherlands (549), and Portugal (515), while the United Kingdom, where the first patients of this outbreak were detected, reported 1,856 cases through mid-July.

Continue reading Translated story: Europe fights the monkeypox outbreak with unequal defences

Translated story: The suicide rate among people in pretrial detention is double that of convicted prisoners

“There is much sorrow in prison, disguised as hostility. The sorrow is plainly visible even in the most angry faces.” This message was posted on John McAfee’s personal Twitter account last June. Thirteen days later, the creator of the McAfee antivirus software died in his cell in the Barcelona prison Brians 2, where he had spent eight months in pretrial detention, pending rulings on extradition to the United States on charges of tax evasion and non-payment. McAfee left a note: “Instead of fully living it. I want to control my future, which doesn’t exist.” The autopsy declared his cause of death to be suicide.

In 2020, according to the Council of Europe’s SPACE study (see methodology), 480 people committed suicide in EU member state prisons, of which 172 were in pretrial detentionThese people were either awaiting trial or pending the outcome of their appeal; they had not been convicted of any crime. Entering prison, especially before trial, correlates with a higher risk of suicide: in 2020, there were 17.5 suicides per 10,000 people in pretrial detention, double the 8.54 suicides per 10,000 people in the rest of the prison population.

Continue reading Translated story: The suicide rate among people in pretrial detention is double that of convicted prisoners