Humans’ relationship with fires is always complicated. Fire brings warmth and necessary for cooking food. But fire is also an uncontrolled beast, bringing devastation and even death.
Wildfires can be very destructive and create threats to people. Today, 98% of all fires in the US are successfully extinguished (Calkin et. al., 2005). However, the more money the government invest into stopping wildfires, the worse the situation is. Year after year, the frequency, severity, and intensity of wildfires has been increasing.
Then the question raises: why this happened? And what can we do?
Two main causations on the worsening wildfire situation are policy and climate change.
On the one hand, the worsening wildfires situation today part fuels by policies. Federal policies of putting out wildfires, rather than letting them burn lead the overgrown of states forests. To illustrate, in response to a devastating fire in 1910, where millions of acres burned and more than 80 people died, suppression became the ‘go-to’ strategy for dealing with fires. In 1974, Congress passed the Federal fire prevention and control act in an effort to save lives (Diaz & Swetnam, 2013). And in 1960, the Smokey bear was created by united stated forest services, which is a best example of effective moral suasion approach on supporting 100% fire suppression (Doerr& Santín, 2016).
The damage inflicted to forest ecosystems by fire suppression strategies has led to much larger and intense wildfires.
On the other hand, Climate change has been a key factor in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires globally. Increased global emissions lead to higher temperature, which impacts aridity and dryness of fuels, decreased soil moisture, and lead to more fire-prone conditions. The Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agricultural shows that an average annual 1 degree C temperature increase would increase the median burned area per year as much as 600 percent in some types of forests and at least a 30 percent increase from 2011 in the burned area by lightening-ignited wildfire by 2060 (Vose et al., 2012).
Climate change is a key factor in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in United States.
Thus, two main solutions on mitigating the worsening wildfires situation are changing or re-editing the policy and mitigating and adapting the climate change.
Policy change should achieve one goal, enhancing forest resilience. From the perspective of forest management, more prescribed burns should be designed, and certain kinds of wildfires should be left to burn, instead of fire suppression strategies all the time. Prescribed burns refer to fires intentionally ignited to meet specific land management objectives. More prescribed burns and let certain wildfires left to burn, reducing built up fuel to prevent future wildfires (Fernandes & Botelho, 2003).
The government agencies designed policies based on the society, include the influences from media, the public and stakeholders. Moral suasion, as one decentralized policy, is effective to use in conjunction with other policies and have widespread spillover effects (Field & Field, 2020). And it’s time to change the way on moral suasion on wildfire problems, re-vamping the Smokey bear. The Smokey Bear is an example of effective moral suasion approach on supporting 100% fire suppression, which could lead the worsening wildfires situation in the future (Doerr& Santín, 2016). To let the public support the government work and gain more understanding on wildfires, the Smokey Bears could be re-vamped from “Only you can prevent wildfires” to “More wildfires should be left to burn to enhance the forest resilience.”
To minimize the climate change impacts on wildfires, mitigation and adaptation are two main responses.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide as the main one) is a main way on mitigating climate change impacts. Carbon dioxide emissions depends on the interaction of four factors and could be modelled as, carbon dioxide emissions equals population times GDP per person times energy per GDP times carbon dioxide per energy (Field & Field, 2020). To reduce the emissions, it’s not feasible to control the first two terms, population and GDP per person due to the ethical reasons and no country would be willing to reduce GDP. However, energy efficiency as energy per GDP and carbon dioxide produced per unit of energy used could be controlled. The energy efficiency could be improved, reducing the energy usage per unit of GDP, by moving towards technologies that require relatively smaller technologies. The carbon dioxide produced per unit of energy used could be reduced by switching to less carbon dioxide intensive fuels, nuclear or renewable energy through decarbonization (Field & Field, 2020).
Mitigating the climate change impacts on wildfires will be not enough, we must also adapt to the inevitable effects (Field & Field, 2020). On the one hand, people should move out the more fire-prone regions. On the other hand, this can be done by providing more accurate information about risk, to develop the better predict system on climate change and wildfires.
In conclusion, the worsening wildfire situation in the US is defined by fires that are increasing in both severity and frequency, mainly caused by old policy and climate change. More prescribed burns, re-vamp the Smokey bear, mitigate and adapt the climate change are ways to mitigate this worsening situation.
References:
Calkin, D. E., Thompson, M. P., & Finney, M. A. (2015). Negative consequences of positive feedback in US wildfire management. Emmitsburg, MD, 9: National Emergency Training Center.
Diaz, H. F., & Swetnam, T. W. (2013). THE WILDFIRES OF 1910: Climatology of an extreme early twentieth-century event and comparison with more recent extremes. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(9), 1361–1370. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-12–00150.1
Doerr, S. H., & Santín, C. (2016). Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: Perceptions versus realities in a changing world. Philosophical Transactions. Biological Sciences, 371(1696), 20150345. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0345
Fernandes, Paulo M., and Hermínio S. Botelho. (1970, Jan 1). “A Review of Prescribed Burning Effectiveness in Fire Hazard Reduction.” CSIRO PUBLISHING. Retrieved from www.publish.csiro.au/wf/WF02042.
Field, B. C., & Field, M. K. (2020). Environmental economics: An introduction (8th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
Vose, James M.; Peterson, David L.; Patel-Weynand, Toral, eds. (2012). Effects of climatic variability and change on forest ecosystems: a comprehensive science synthesis for the U.S. forest sector. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. Pacific Northwest Research Station. 265 p.
