Research Archives - Page 4 of 5

Wildfire exposure felt unequally among elderly, low-income populations

Hunter BasslerNovember 28, 2023November 29, 2023Researchsocial factors, wildfire vulnerability1 Comment

Around 90 percent of all people exposed to wildfires over the past 23 years lived in either California, Oregon, or Washington. Among those, researchers found a disproportionate number were poor, a racial minority, disabled, or over the age of 65.

A recent study examined the “social vulnerability” of the people exposed to wildfires over the last two decades. Social vulnerability describes how persons with certain social, economic, or demographic traits were more susceptible to harm from hazards including wildfires or other natural disasters.

From 2000 to 2021, the number of people in the western United States who lived in fire-affected areas increased by 185 percent, while structure losses from wildfires increased by 246 percent. The vulnerability of the people living there, however, isn’t well known despite these populations potentially never recovering after a disaster strikes.

Researchers asked whether highly vulnerable people were disproportionately exposed to wildfire, how vulnerability has changed over the past 20 years, whether population changes before a fire alter the vulnerability of the population, and whether social vulnerability of people exposed to fires was equal among states.

Each of the three West Coast states recorded disproportionate wildfire exposure of the socially vulnerable; Oregon and Washington had more than 40 percent of their exposed population being highly vulnerable while California had around 8 percent of of those exposed considered highly vulnerable. The most vulnerable populations were also those with low income, while age, minority status, and disability also affected populations’ ability to cope after wildfire.

The number of highly vulnerable people exposed to fire in the three states also increased by 249 percent over the past two decades. An increase in social vulnerability of populations in burned areas was the main contributor to increased exposure in California, while Oregon and Washington saw wildfires increasingly encroaching on vulnerable population areas.

“Our analysis highlights the need to increase understanding of the social characteristics that affect vulnerability, to inform effective mitigation and adaptation strategies,” the study said. “Particular attention to residents who are older, living with a disability, living in group quarters, and with limited English-speaking skills may be warranted, and cultural differences need to be addressed for effective policy development and response.”

Other research published earlier this year, The Path of Flames: Understanding and Responding to Fatal Wildfires, found unequal access and assistance could also play a role in who survives and who dies during catastrophic wildfires. In the study, researchers found that for many of the Paradise, California residents who died in the 2018 Camp Fire, the inability to evacuate on their own was a major factor in their deaths.

Another

More simultaneous large fires in the next 60 years

Hunter BasslerNovember 3, 2023Researchlarge fires, megafires, research4 Comments

Wildfire simultaneity, or numerous large wildfires burning at the same time, will become at least twice as frequent by 2085, researchers are warning. A steadily increasing number of large wildland fires — and the number of acres burned — has occurred over the past few decades in the American West, but new research has found that simultaneous large fires will burn even more often.

“Future regional increases in simultaneous large Western USA wildfires” was published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research; it focused on wildfires that burned 1,000 acres or more between 1984 and 2015. Researchers used multiple fire indices to model how simultaneity will likely change over the next 60 years. The study also measured the fires by Geographic Area Coordination Centers to see whether some geographic areas might see greater increases compared with others.

Simultaneous wildfires were projected to increase in every area of the West. Not only were “bad years” projected to increase, but increases in simultaneity also led to more intense wildfires. Peak season for simultaneous wildfires was projected to become several weeks longer by the end of the century.

“The trend was particularly pronounced for the most severe wildfire seasons — those that currently occur only every 10 years on average,” the National Center for Atmospheric Research said. “In the future, such seasons may be expected to occur at least twice as often, and up to nearly five times per decade in the northern Rocky Mountains, which was the most affected region.”

The findings point toward a risk in an already understaffed and under-resourced wildland firefighting force. Because crews are transferred across the nation, or sometimes even across nations, to battle fires depending on when an area’s season peaks, an increase in peak season length could mean major challenges for firefighters and fire managers.

“Because firefighting decisions about resource distribution, pre-positioning, and suppression strategies consider simultaneity as a factor, these results underscore the importance of potential changes in simultaneity for fire management decision-making,” the study says.

Steps can reportedly be taken to lessen the future risk of simultaneous wildfires, including thinning forests, conducting prescribed burns, and increasing numbers of firefighting crews and equipment. But that will depend on how long it will take to make those changes.

“The strain on resources created by simultaneous fires can affect the ability to conduct prescribed burns and pursue other preventative action,” the center said.

California this year got off easy — SO FAR

Kelly AnderssonOctober 16, 2023ResearchCalifornia, fire season, R51 Comment

The acreage burned to date in California is less than a third of the state’s 5-year average, according to Cal Fire, and experts attribute the lower numbers to the historic winter storms and a record snowpack in the Pacific Southwest. But those “atmospheric river” storms resulted in huge fuels growth that could, with gusty autumn winds, mean wildfires into November or even December.

“Now is not the time for people to let their guard down,” said Brian Newman, assistant chief of Cal Fire’s Amador-El Dorado Unit. “We still have fire season ahead of us before we get into winter rains that would finally end it.”

Rim Fire, 2013. Inciweb photo — 2013 Rim Fire, inciweb photo.

California’s dry, windy, and hot weather conditions from spring through late autumn can produce moderate to severe wildfires. Pre-1800, when the area was much more forested and the ecology also much more resilient, 4.4 million acres of forest and shrubland burned each year. California land area totals about 100 million acres; since 2000 annual burned acreage has ranged between 90,000 acres (0.09 percent of the state), and 1,590,000 acres (1.59 percent). During the 2020 wildfire season alone, over 8,100 fires contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of land.

According to the Sacramento Bee, with 317,191 acres burned so far this year, that’s under 30 percent of the 5-year average of 1.2 million acres for the same year-to-date period. Even though this season’s totaled a “normal” number of new fires, the extra precipitation and cool nights kept the acreage down. Without a dramatic weather change in the next couple of months, California will be experiencing its second straight year of mild wildfire season.

Last year, fewer than 363,000 acres burned. This year’s largest fire, the Smith River Complex near the Oregon border, totaled 95,017 — under 100,000 acres. In 2020 approximately 4.3 million acres burned, and in 2021, 2.6 million acres. Climate scientists are confident that warming temperatures have increased the severity and length of fire seasons, but many hesitate to actually attribute California’s mild 2023 wildfire season to climate change. “I tend not to give much credence to the idea that single events and single summers or winters can be ascribed to climate change,” said Hugh Safford, chief scientist of Vibrant Planet and faculty at the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy.

“There’s no question that climate warming is having a major impact on expanding the fire season and increasing severity,” he said. “But California has the highest inter-annual variability and precipitation of any state in the United States. It is normal to go from a record wet year to a record — or nearly record — dry year, and that’s just the way it is.”

According to the Daily Mail, Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, says he deliberately omitted a key fact in a climate change piece recently published to ensure that editors would run it — the fact that 80 percent of wildfires are human-caused. Brown gave as an example a Nature paper he recently authored, “Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California.” Brown said the paper focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior — but ignores other key factors.

He said academic journals now reject papers that don’t “support certain narratives” and said the media focus on climate change as the root cause of wildfires — including the recent devastating fires in Hawaii. Brown wrote in a piece for The Free Press that this distorts a great deal of climate science research.

But the climate models seen by Erwan Monier, associate professor of climate change impacts at UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, make him predict that this upcoming year’s combination of a strong El Niño and warmer ocean temperatures could mean another wet year. “This is most likely the configuration that will control California’s climate this winter,” he said, “and will have implications for the next wildfire season. Because if we have another very wet winter, that means we’ll have even more moisture that could again lead to mild fires next year.”

Scientists predict global temperature increases from human-made greenhouse gases will continue. Severe weather damage will also increase and intensify.

What leading researchers in climate change effects (wildfire et al.) have found, though, lines up with what firefighters observe in the field:

- - We already see effects that scientists predicted, such as the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense heat waves.
  - Scientists predict global temperature increases from human-made greenhouse gases will continue. Severe weather damage will also increase and intensify.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth’s climate, driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, are already creating widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner. Wildfires and fire seasons are just a piece of the many changes that are coming — changes that are here now.

Fires burn more tree cover every year due to climate change

Hunter BasslerSeptember 13, 2023Researchclimate change, Forest cover5 Comments

A new report has confirmed what forest managers have been warning the public about for years: Forest fires are becoming more widespread thanks to climate change.

The report, created by researchers at the University of Maryland, broke down global satellite data and found wildfires were the cause of 26 to 29 percent of global forest loss between 2001 and 2019. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), further analyzes the researchers’ maps to estimate just how many more acres of forests were lost to fires compared with two decades ago.

“We calculated that forest fires now result in 3 million more hectares (~7.4 million acres) of tree cover loss per year compared with 2001 … and accounted for more than one-quarter of all tree cover loss over the past 20 years,” OCHA said.

The researchers also reported that 70 percent of the tree cover lost to fires occurred in boreal forests, with fire-related tree loss increasing 3 percent every year since 2001. The cause of the increase was northern high-latitude areas warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet, contributing to longer fire seasons.

Tree cover loss from fires in tropical regions also increased by 5 percent per year since 2001, resulting in roughly 15 percent of global tree cover loss from fire over the 20-year period. The loss was reportedly worsened by increasing forest degradation attributed to deforestation and agriculture expansion.

“There is no solution for bringing fire activity back down to historical levels without drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions and breaking the fire-climate feedback loop,” OCHA said in response to the report. “Improving forest resilience by ending deforestation and forest degradation is key to preventing future fires.”

The full report is [HERE].

Burning Hot: 50 Years of U.S. Fire Weather

Kelly AnderssonMay 30, 2023ResearchClimate Central, climate change, fire weather8 Comments

Climate Central has examined historical trends in fire weather — a combination of low humidity, high heat, and strong winds — across the U.S., using data from 476 weather stations to assess trends in 245 climate divisions spanning all 48 contiguous states over a 50-year period from 1973 to 2022.

Wildfire seasons have become longer and more intense, especially across the West, and the research also found that many parts of the East have experienced smaller but important increases in fire weather. Even small increases in the East — with almost 28 million homes in fire-prone areas — puts millions more people at increased risk. As the research intro points out, the same weather variables that influence fire weather and wildfire are factors that determine the safe use of prescribed fire, critical to reducing fuels and thus fire risk. More fire weather days means fewer windows for prescribed burning.

The reports include both summaries and in-depth comparisons of Fifty Years of Fire Weather in the West (example: Some places, including parts of Texas, California, Oregon, and Washington, are experiencing fire weather more than twice as often now as in the early 1970s) and Fifty Years of Fire Weather in the East (example: New England has experienced a decrease in annual fire weather days, driven largely by fewer days in which the wind speed variable hit the analytical threshold). Reduced wind speeds could be partially attributed to a decrease in the temperature gradient between land and sea along the Gulf of Maine, as sea surface temperatures have warmed drastically due to climate change.

Climate Central’s new report, Wildfire Weather: Analyzing the 50-year shift across America, expands on wildfire risks and adaptation across the country. The full report discusses other key factors that influence wildfire, including fuels, other weather conditions, and human activity.

$11 million contest for innovation in fighting fire

Kelly AnderssonApril 22, 2023Researchdetection, drones, technology, XPRIZE7 Comments

Best-selling author and futurist Peter Diamandis became frustrated in recent years with the “craziness” of constant wildfire alerts he’d received. But unlike most people, Diamandis has a Rolodex full of wealthy benefactors and politicians, along with experience with a solution he had used before: Create a contest.

On April 21 his group XPRIZE launched its latest contest: finding new ideas to detect and suppress wildfires.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) said the prize threshold includes detecting and suppressing a high-risk wildfire in 10 minutes or less, and pinpointing from space all fire ignitions across multiple states or countries — in 60 seconds. These are the challenges for innovators in XPRIZE Wildfire, a four-year, $11 million competition to develop and demonstrate fully autonomous capabilities to find and fight wildfires.

The United Nations, the White House, and Congress recently have prioritized destructive wildfires as a major economic, environmental, and safety threat. Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E, said they are co-sponsoring the project. “Today’s launch of XPRIZE Wildfire is a call-to-action to entrepreneurs, roboticists, artificial-intelligence experts, scientists, and innovators from across the globe to revolutionize wildfire detection and suppression,” she said.

XPRIZE Wildfire encourages teams from around the world to innovate across firefighting technologies in two different tracks designed to transform how fires are detected and suppressed.

- In the Autonomous Wildfire Response track, teams will need to monitor at least 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), and autonomously suppress a wildfire within 10 minutes of detection.
- In the Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence track, teams will have one minute to accurately detect all fires across a landscape larger than entire states or countries, and 10 minutes to precisely characterize and report data (with the fewest false positives) to two ground stations.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Palmer Luckey, a 30-year-old founder of Oculus, a virtual reality company that sold for $2 billion, announced that he was forming the first team to compete for the prize. He said he cares more about solving the problem than winning the money, but he believes the cash will motivate other contestants to form teams and compete.

“I sold my last company for billions of dollars so I can do whatever I want,” he said. “We started working on wildfire tech because I think it’s very, very important. The money in this prize to me is honestly immaterial.” Luckey said at the contest launch that he thinks software, not hardware, will make the difference in detecting and containing fires.

The four-year contest is not winner-take-all. Teams will compete for top prizes of as much as $3.5 million and a bonus $1 million prize to develop technology that can detect fires both from the ground and from space, and fight them using drones or other autonomous vehicles. They’ll compete, for example, to see which technology can accurately detect fires across a land mass the size of a state or country in one minute or suppress fires using an autonomous vehicle within 10 minutes.

Andrea Santy, who is running the competition for XPrize, also said the prize money may not be the most important driver. Teams will benefit from multiple rounds of live testing and validation that would be hard to organize independently. The group is spending an additional $11 million beyond the prize money to run the contest, she said; some of that money will fund a documentary about the competition.

XPRIZE Wildfire is offered in partnership with Co-Sponsors PG&E and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Presenting Sponsor Minderoo Foundation, Bonus Prize Sponsor Lockheed Martin, Supporting Sponsor Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Benefactors Nichola Eliovits and Michael Antonov. Sixteen teams are already registered. For more information, to get involved, or to register a team to compete, visit the xprize.org/wildfire website.

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