How climate change is supercharging wildfires
Extreme time seems to make the front page of the newspapers almost every week, while disasters are getting more and more seasonal, beat records and hit the places they never have before.
Decades of scientific research have proven that climate change of human origin makes certain disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The combustion of fossil fuels such as petroleum, gas and coal releases carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, where it imprisoned heat, warms the planet and modifies the conditions in which the extreme weather is formed. These changes occur faster than any time in the past 800,000 years, according to Climate Records.
Below, we decompose what experts know – and what they do not do – on the links between climate change and Forest fires.
In a warmer and drier world, forest fires have become more frequent and destructive. Scientists have definitely linked anthropic climate change to increased risk of forest fires: a 2016 study revealed that, due to carbon emissions caused by humans, the total number of large fires since 1984 had doubled. A 2021 study supported by the NOAA concluded in the same way that climate change is mainly responsible for forest fire conditions, such as warmer and drier summers. Forest fires themselves also release carbon when trees and other plants increase in flames. Globally, in 2023, forest fires caused 8.6 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
The west of the United States is the epicenter of the growing crisis in country forest fires: dry and hot conditions become more dangerous, snow melted earlier in spring and summer droughts have become more serious. Warming temperatures also encourage epidemics of pests such as bark beetles, weakening or killing large strips of forests. This dead and dried vegetation becomes of ignition while waiting for a spark – whether it be fires of waste or debris, lightning blows or poorly won artifice fires.
But these risky conditions are now more common in other parts of the country as well. On the east coast, states have more days of “fire time” per year than they were 50 years ago. In the sterile New Jersey pine forest, for example, the dry conditions of fall and winter mean that deciduous trees lose drier leaves on the soil of the forest – essentially, the belling awaiting a spark.
As the conditions that forest fires have aggravated, the number of people living in areas subject to forest fires. Between 1990 and 2010, according to the Forest Service, housing developments in “the interface of wild -urban land” – a vulnerable ecological area where housing shorts or mixed with the banks of the forest – increased by 41%.
Like most climatic events, forest fires are an inherent natural process and plant species have adapted to live alongside low -intensity cyclic fires. For thousands of years, indigenous tribes have reduced the risk of fire using controlled or cultural burns, by strategically cleaning dried vegetation areas before nature takes its course. European settlers, and later the federal government, did not have the same relationship with fires and forests. Cultural and ecological practice has been prohibited for centuries in certain states, including California. The US Forest Service also had a “10 -hour policy” for decades that asked the fire agencies to extinguish each fire the same day as he started – even those who burn low and slow. The abandonment of controlled burns and focusing on the abolition of fires caused an accumulation of dead vegetation which has contributed to fuel larger fires. It is only recently that certain environmentalists and legislators have reversed the course, collaborating with tribes to reintroduce controlled burns to improve forest management.
“There are solutions that we have in our knowledge and management approaches that can help restore these ecosystems and can also benefit the public,” the American research ecologist told Grist.
