Earth ablaze

The global area of land burned is thought to have declined in recent decades – but this does not mean that wildfires are not an increasing concern.

Key reasons why the area burned is decreasing is because natural landscapes, such as African savannah and grasslands, are being converted to agriculture, which reduces the risk of burning. Increased fire suppression is another factor.

"In the Mediterranean, the area that’s been burning has been declining, but that doesn’t mean that the fires that are burning there are not a problem because the fires are more ferocious,” says Prof Doerr.

In the western part of North America, fire activity is on the increase, as evidenced by severe blazes that struck California in 2018 and 2020, making it harder for landscapes to recover.

A review published in 2020, based on analysing dozens of previous studies, found that climate change had “already led to a global increase in the frequency and severity of fire weather, increasing the risks of wildfire” in Amazonia, southern Europe, Scandinavia, the western US and Canada.

Fire risks in Siberia and Australia too have increased because of human-induced warming. One study found that the fire weather season has lengthened by an average of one fifth globally.

The effect of climate change on wildfires is set to strengthen as temperatures continue to rise. In the Mediterranean, a 1.5°C increase on pre-industrial levels is likely to cause the average burned area to increase by 40 per cent, according to 2018 research.

In areas, such as northern Canada or Siberia, where humans have had very little effect on the landscape, climate change is the key issue.

“Especially in the north, [there has been] a three to four degree increase in the temperature, compared to the global average of 1 [°C],” said Prof Doerr.

But climate change is not the only factor affecting wildfires; differences in how forests are managed are also important in regions such as Europe and the United States. Greater efforts are made to prevent or stamp out wildfires, so when large fires do happen, they may burn fiercely because there is more flammable material. This is called the fire paradox.

Attributing particular fires to climate change is difficult, but researchers can now say with more certainty that it is causing many types of fires to become more likely, more severe and to cover a greater area.

"Attribution studies have been done for the bush fires in Australia. They were about 30 per cent more probable because of climate change,” says Dr Santin Nuno.

Financial costs are significant. The US economy is estimated to have lost $148.5bn because of the 2018 wildfire season in California, the state’s worst on record until last year.

That 2020 fire season in the western US, including California, where more than 1.5m hectares were burnt, is thought likely to cost insurers between $7bn and $13bn.

The costs extend well beyond the monetary. California’s 2020 wildfires are estimated to have emitted 112 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, as much as 24.2m cars produce in a year.

Research by Prof Doerr and Dr Santin Nuno has found, though, that around 12 per cent of the carbon emissions from fires remains locked up in charcoal and is released only very slowly.

A study published in 2012 estimated that, including the effects of air pollution, 339,000 people die each year from wildfires, controlled burning on farms and peat fires. About half the deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa and around 110,000 in Asia.

A report commissioned by the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) concluded that Australia’s 2019/20 bushfires – branded the “black summer” – killed or displaced almost three billion animals, including 2.46 billion reptiles, 143 million mammals and 180 million birds.

Described as unparalleled in their severity and number, the fires burned about 11.46m hectares – an area more than one third larger than the UAE.

With wildfires and extreme weather becoming increasingly common, environment agencies and fire services around the world are rushing to develop new techniques for preventing and containing blazes.

Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), drones and advanced new building materials could revolutionise the way fires are fought.

But a host of low-tech solutions, including a renewed emphasis on fire-safe building practices, also promise to make the threat of wildfires easier to live with.

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

Faced with such overwhelming force, even the best-equipped and most experienced countries have struggled to deal with widespread fires this year.

In the United States, which suffered an extreme heatwave last summer, dozens of severe blazes have raged in western states, from Oregon and Washington to Arizona and New Mexico.

One US company has come up with an innovative way of using drones to fight fire with fire.

Drone Amplified’s Ignis device mounts to commercially available drones, allowing them to drop hundreds of small spheres known as dragon eggs, which contain chemicals that catch fire as they hit the ground, starting fires in specific areas.

But how can purposefully starting fires help prevent uncontrollable wildfires from continuing to do damage?

Controlled, or prescribed burns – blazes intentionally set by humans – have been used for centuries to fight wildfires. They are often used to create firebreaks – gaps between trees and other vegetation that can slow or even stop fires from passing through an area – and to clear highly flammable dried vegetation.

Helicopters are still often used to start controlled burns in a similar fashion to the drones, risking the safety of the crew, who are also unable to fly in poor weather or at night.

The increased use of drones in firefighting could help environment agencies move away from attempting to completely extinguish fires, reducing the risk to human firefighters and vulnerable communities.

“We can move away from a full suppression policy to let some fires burn,” said Dr Cristina Santin Nuno, a research fellow at the Biodiversity Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council and an honorary research associate at Swansea University in the UK.

“In the US, they’re moving to that. [But] last season, because it was so bad, they said: ‘We understand we’re going to have to let fires burn, but we’re not going to let fires burn,’” she told The National.

The US Forest Service says controlled burns can not only help protect communities from dangerous fires but are also good for the health of ecosystems, providing nutrients to the soil and helping plants to grow.

However, the conditions under which fires can be allowed to burn or can be deliberately started are becoming increasingly narrow. The weather must not be too dry or windy.

This approach is also difficult to apply in more densely populated landscapes like in Europe.

Alternatives include removing vegetation, the planting of less flammable tree species and stricter rules to prevent building within fire-risk areas.

HIGH TECH SOLUTIONS

Setting fires is not the only way that drones could help change the way humans learn to live with wildfires.

Rabih Bou Rashid, the founder of Falcon Eye Drones, a UAE-based company that supplies drones for commercial and industrial applications, said the technology could help firefighters in two main ways: “Drones have two uses in this situation: using infrared cameras to identify hot spots and detect new fires early, as well as taking wind measurements to gauge the direction the fire will go in and guide evacuation orders.”

While unable to carry large quantities of water or flame retardant, unmanned aerial systems, he said, “have the benefit of being faster and more reactive than a helicopter”.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also being used to help give human firefighters a head start against wildfires.

In Brazil, more than 184,000 fires reported in 2021 and nearly half were in the Amazon rainforest.

In 2018, a Brazilian agricultural technology company called Syntecsys began installing cameras on towers that would feed images back to an AI system. A deep-learning algorithm then allowed the AI to identify signs of fire in the images.

Researchers found the AI could detect fire with an accuracy of 95 per cent and reduced the average length of time it took to detect a fire in more than 35,000 square kilometres of forest from 40 minutes to less than five.

Brazil already makes extensive use of satellites to monitor fires in the Amazon.

Some 28,060 fires were detected by satellite in the world’s largest rainforest in August last year, a decline of four per cent compared to the same month in 2020 when fires likely hit the highest point in a decade, according to Brazil's national space research agency Inpe.

Researchers believe AI systems will one day be able to predict where wildfires might break out before they happen.

LOW TECH SOLUTIONS

Not all of the techniques under development for managing wildfires require advanced technology, however.

Fireproof building materials are also seen as an important area in which communities can increase their ability to live with the risk of wildfires.

In Australia, where 34 people died and 2,779 houses were destroyed during the 2019 to 2020 bushfire season, the government last year launched a project to help people adapt their homes to make them more resilient to fire.

Under the programme, the Bushfire Building Council of Australia (BBCA) will give a rating out of five stars to homes in high-risk areas and suggest ways that residents can improve their score, including changes to landscaping, roof materials or building design.

Australia already had building codes that took into account wildfire planning and risk, but the BBCA estimated that some 90 per cent of buildings in fire-prone areas do not meet the requirements because they predated them.

In an even more low-tech development, goatherders have found an innovative way of helping to tackle wildfires.

In the US, herds of hundreds of goats have been set loose on fire-prone areas, consuming weeds and other vegetation and even replenishing the soil with manure and increasing its ability to hold water.

And in Ireland, where one major wildfire blanketed parts of Dublin with smoke last summer, a herd of 25 goats was set loose on the country’s hills to eat a dry shrub called gorse which is the fuel for many of the country’s wildfires.

The goats wore GPS trackers, enabling the herders to guide them to create firebreaks and control plant regrowth, NPR reported.

Wildfires have occurred on Earth since the dawn of time and studies have shown that their frequency has actually decreased.

However, their intensity and damage they cause has increased over the years - in tandem with rising global temperatures and increasingly arid conditions.

Climate change has risen to the top of the international political agenda, making wildfires and their underlying causes feel like a greater issue than ever before.

But how have wildfires – which have long been a problem in many parts of the world – become a danger to so many people?

One factor causing wildfires to increase in some areas is the growth of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – the boundary between developed land and natural environments. In areas where areas of truly natural landscapes are fewer, the term rural-urban interface (RUI) is more often used.

A 2018 study found that between 1990 and 2010, the WUI in the US increased by 41 per cent in terms of the number of houses (from 30.8m to 43.4m), and by 33 per cent in land area (from 581,000 to 770,000 square km).

“WUI growth often results in more wildfire ignitions, putting more lives and houses at risk. Wildfire problems will not abate if recent housing growth trends continue,” the researchers wrote in their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Cristina Santin Nuno, of the Spanish National Research Council, said the expansion of the WUI was “very dangerous”.

Similar expansion has been observed in Europe as well as the US and Dr Nuno pointed to the 2018 wildfires in the coastal Attica area of Greece, in which more than 100 people died, as an example of the consequences of the expanding frontier between developed and natural environments. Illegal construction in the area was blamed for making the fires worse.

“There have been a lot of studies proving that one of the problems is that growth of these houses in the middle of the pine forest is completely unregulated. This is still happening,” she said.

“They had big fires this year as well. The government just announced they are going to increase the money for fire suppression – they are going to buy more planes, bigger planes.

“But they haven't announced anything about mitigation before the fire. This is so important. Regulation of building is one of the key things.”

SCORCHED EARTH

Experts say the wildfire situation is not likely to improve, with blazes likely to become even more common as global temperatures continue to rise and extreme weather events occur more often.

Dr Imma Oliveras, a junior research fellow in ecosystems science at the University of Oxford, said the fires themselves can create a domino effect, with blazes creating the perfect conditions for other even larger fires.

“As the climate gets warmer and the rainfall regime is being altered, we are expecting more periods with high temperatures and low air humidity sustained for long-periods of time, which create extreme drought conditions. These conditions favour what we call ‘fire weather’, which is meteorological conditions which favour the drying of the vegetation and the spread of fire. These new fires occur in unusually dry vegetation and unusually dry conditions, and create what we know as mega-fires,” she said.

Mega-fires, like the Bootleg fire that swept through southern Oregon in July after months of drought, can create their own weather systems, whipping up high winds and further drying plant material. They can become so intense that extinguishing them would be impossible, Dr Oliveras said.

Where some wildfires can benefit the environment, clearing dead plants and replenishing nutrients in the soil, mega-fires “burn at a much higher intensity and totally char the whole landscape,” she explained.

Such wildfires, she said, do so much damage to the soil that it takes much longer for plants to recover naturally, leaving the landscape more vulnerable to erosion.

Areas with organic rich soil are a particular concern – severe fires here release large amounts of carbon dioxide from the ground, which will take thousands of years to recover.

Severe wildfires have also led to declines in biodiversity across the globe.

An estimated 20 per cent of Australia’s forest cover went up in smoke during the Black Summer wildfire season, according to analysis published in Nature Climate Change in February 2020.

Experts fear the fires may have pushed as many as 500 species of animal towards extinction.

The impact of wildfires on biodiversity, if left unchecked, could one day have a catastrophic effect on humans.

“Biodiversity naturally recycles resources and gives us what we need for living,” said Dr Oliveras. “We depend on the land to grow our food, on clean water to drink and on the air to breathe. Although one may think that humans can engineer labs to artificially grow food and even purify water, this would not sustain humanity,” she said.

To prevent the continued degradation of biodiversity and reduce the effects of climate change, communities living in fire-prone environments around the world will have to adapt.

Preventative measures like controlled burns and careful ecosystem management will be important tools to help achieve this, but Dr Olivera said sustained, long-term programmes were needed to protect the planet.

“We need to think about long-term management programmes in which we create sustainable and resilient landscapes. We need to co-exist with natural vegetation, towns and cities, fields and croplands and create landscapes that are more resilient to these new realities,” she said.

Adapting to the new reality of life in a world on fire will require “a shift in the paradigm of how we think and manage our land”.