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Climate

The World’s Wildfire Models Are Getting Torched

“We’re in a downward spiral in Dante’s circle of hell.”

A forest fire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Three weeks after wildfire smoke wafted over the Eastern United States, the smoke is back, blanketing the Midwest in a toxic haze. The proximate cause is simple: Canada is still burning at an unprecedented rate.

Over 450 fires are raging across the country, with half of them categorically out of control, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Canada’s fire season has already become the country’s worst in recorded history.

It’s also an example of a larger trend: Fires worldwide are becoming exponentially larger and more destructive. This has led experts to a harrowing conclusion: The world’s “fire regimes” (i.e the long-term trends and behavior of fire) may potentially become so powerful, so destructive, and so frequent that fire experts can no longer predict their behavior based on current models.

“Some people like to say this is the new normal. I really do not like that term. Normal suggests a steady state. We’re not in a steady state. We’re in a downward spiral in Dante’s circle of hell,” Michael Flannigan, a lead fire researcher at Thompson Rivers University, told me.

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  • Flannigan has researched fires for over four decades. During that time, he found that fire’s overall behavior would shift toward more destructive levels, thanks to climate change, by mid-century. But what he and his colleagues fear now, however, is that these end-of-century-levels are already here.

    Today, fires like those in Canada, are orders of magnitude bigger, far more frequent, earlier in the year, and far more damaging than in the 1980s and ‘90s. (It’s worth pointing out, though, that it isn’t clear whether the Canadian fire are connected to climate change.) And once fires decimate an ecosystem, that area can’t store as much carbon, letting more of it linger in the atmosphere, compounding the effects of global warming. In recent years, the immense damage done by fires in Australia, Greece, Chile, Turkey, and elsewhere has touched this third rail far too many times.

    How did we get here, and what’s the fix?

    One solution might be better fire management, which studies have shown return $6 for every dollar a government spends on it.

    Yet over the past few decades, governments have done the opposite, slowly reducing forest management and fire prevention measures, which often involve controlled burns, opting instead to invest in active fire suppression. At the same time, towns and cities have expanded into fire-prone areas in developed countries like the United States and Canada. This combination has proved catastrophic for places like Paradise, California, in 2018.

    “[In Paradise,] there was almost exactly the same fire in 1965, but nobody was hurt because there was nobody there. Fast forward to 2018, and nearly the whole town burned down under virtually the same weather and fuel conditions,” Peter Moore, a consulting fire management specialist at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, told me.

    In fire-prone countries such as the United States, fire economics are outdated and outgunned. The amount the U.S. Forest Service spends on fire suppression leapt from 15 percent of the budget to 55 percent in recent years. U.S. National Interagency Fire Center estimates that fire suppression efforts cost all federal agencies around $4.4 billion in 2021.

    Fire experts suggest investing in preventative measures, like controlled burns that clear out kindling on forest floors or banning people from even entering forests during strong fire weather days, as Canada is doing now..

    FAO’s Moore described the potential benefits of reestablishing traditional fire knowledge as one viable approach to managing fire-prone landscapes, as has been done in Ghana and Australia.

    But what if the world can’t nail down fire management? Experts say: Look for more extremes ahead.

    “It’s like drug resistant bacteria,” Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, told me. “We got rid of all the easy ones, and the ones that are left out or the ones that are beyond our ability to control.”

    Read more about the wildfire smoke:

    What the Smoke Has in Store

    How to Stay Safe from the Wildfire Smoke Indoors

    Why Are the Canadian Wildfires So Bad This Year?

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    Adaptation

    The ‘Buffer’ That Can Protect a Town from Wildfires

    Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.

    Homes as a wildfire buffer.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.

    More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.

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    Spotlight

    How the Tax Bill Is Empowering Anti-Renewables Activists

    A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.

    Massachusetts and solar panels.
    Heatmap Illustration/Library of Congress, Getty Images

    A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.

    Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”

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    Hotspots

    The Midwest Is Becoming Even Tougher for Solar Projects

    And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.

    The United States.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.

    • Late last week, this county was teed up to potentially advance a new restrictive solar ordinance that would’ve cut off zoning access for large-scale facilities. That’s obviously bad for developers. But it would’ve still allowed solar facilities up to 50 acres and grandfathered in projects that had previously signed agreements with local officials.
    • However, solar opponents swamped the county Area Planning Commission meeting to decide on the ordinance, turning it into an over four-hour display in which many requested in public comments to outright ban solar projects entirely without a grandfathering clause.
    • It’s clear part of the opposition is inflamed over the EDF Paddlefish Solar project, which we ranked last year as one of the nation’s top imperiled renewables facilities in progress. The project has already resulted in a moratorium in another county, Huntington.
    • Although the Paddlefish project is not unique in its risks, it is what we view as a bellwether for the future of solar development in farming communities, as the Fort Wayne-adjacent county is a picturesque display of many areas across the United States. Pro-renewables advocates have sought to tamp down opposition with tactics such as a direct text messaging campaign, which I previously scooped last week.
    • Yet despite the counter-communications, momentum is heading in the other direction. At the meeting, officials ultimately decided to punt a decision to next month so they could edit their draft ordinance to assuage aggrieved residents.
    • Also worth noting: anyone could see from Heatmap Pro data that this county would be an incredibly difficult fight for a solar developer. Despite a slim majority of local support for renewable energy, the county has a nearly 100% opposition risk rating, due in no small part to its large agricultural workforce and MAGA leanings.

    2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.

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