Researchers are still learning the full impact of the Australian brushfires that burned nearly 60 million acres, or 24 million hectares, between 2019 and 2020.
The most recent report on the bushfires focused on how they affected the nation’s tourism industry, specifically how previous reports underestimated the financial losses.
“Our novel research into the losses from the tourism shutdown resulting from Australia’s 2019-20 fires found that flowing on from direct impacts of AU $1.7 billion, indirect impacts along supply chains resulted in $2.8 billion in total output losses and $1.6 billion in reduced consumption,” the University of Sydney researchers’ report said. “We calculated significant spill-over costs, with total output losses being an increase of 61 percent on top of the direct damages identified.”
The study was reportedly the first time researchers documented changes throughout Australia’s entire supply chain, rather than focusing on specific parts of the Australian economy. Researchers said the ability to fully quantify disasters’ effects on a nation’s economy will become more important as climate change intensifies natural disasters.
“Natural hazards may increase economic inequalities, with the burden of climate adaptation and mitigation adding to the costs of governments already struggling under business-as-usual,” the report says. “Australia’s reputation as a pristine destination could become permanently damaged in the longer term under global warming, with fewer people traveling in Australia in our peak summer holiday season; similarly, people may start to avoid other countries and regions that are increasingly in the media for their wildfires and other natural hazards.”
Researchers are still learning the full impact of the Australian brushfires that burned nearly 60 million acres, or 24 million hectares, between 2019 and 2020.
Numerous reports have looked into different facets of the disastrous season, including the massive loss of plant life and firefighter experiences during the bushfires.
Wildfire seasons have been getting longer since the 1970s, according to (among others) the USDA Climate Hubs.
“The wildfire season in Western states has extended from 5 months to over 7 months in length,” the department said. Since the 1980s, the annual number of large fires and area burned has significantly increased (according to a report by Anthony Westerling, Hugo Hidalgo, Daniel Cayan, and Thomas Swetnam in the journal Science). The average burn time of individual fires has grown from 6 days (between 1973 and 1982) to 52 days (between 2003 and 2012).
The increase in another wildfire phenomenon may spell the end of wildfire seasons altogether and turn wildland firefighting into a year-round effort, more than it already is.
“Zombie fires,” or wildfires that smolder underground during the winter before reemerging in the spring, are becoming more common in Arctic forests, according to a 2021 study published in Scientific American. The most likely cause was attributed to climate change.
“Contrary to the hypothesis that overwinter fires sustain themselves in carbon-rich, organic soil layers known as peat, the researchers learned that most of them had burned in drier, upland sites with dense tree populations; the find suggested fires had instead smoldered underground in woody tree roots,” another Scientific American article on the subject said.
The woody tree roots in British Columbia’s boreal forests are feared to be the next place where a zombie fire could emerge, continuing Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season of last year. As of January 18, the BC Wildfire Service map shows that around 100 active wildfires are still burning in the province, some of which are still smoldering underground and threaten to kick off yet another disastrous wildfire season this year.
BC Wildfire Service map — current fires — 01/26/2024
It wouldn’t be the first time zombie fires foretold a bad fire season. At the beginning of 2023, British Columbia recorded 16 “carryover” fires, according to the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, and BC Wildfire Service data shows that in most years since 2014, only five or fewer carryover fires were reported.
“A lot of people have talked about the 2023 fire season being over, but it’s not over,” said Sonja Leverkus, a BC wildland fire crew leader. “It is not over in northeast British Columbia. Our fires did not stop burning.”
In 2018 Rick Stratton, a USFS fire planning program manager for the R6 Regional Office in Portland and Pyrologix provided a Quantitative Wildland Fire Risk Assessment for communities most at risk in the Pacific Northwest — and he listed the top 25.
Six years later he compared that assessment with what had actually happened, and 18 of the 25 communities had recorded significant/catastrophic wildland fires. His assessment illustrates a rapidly evolving wildland fire environment, in which entire communities are at risk. Below are some of Stratton’s slides.
How do interface disasters occur? Jack Cohen‘s work on wildland/urban interface fires demonstrated that in the beginning, the set-up for a disaster fire includes extreme fire conditions — much of which has been widespread across the West over the last decade or more. Abundant dry fuels, fire-friendly weather such as drought, extreme heat, low humidities, and high winds all contribute to a landscape ready for a fire disaster.
To that setting is added both wildland fire (with rapid spread) and urban fire — which includes multiple simultaneous ignitions and residential areas in which fire spreads from house to house to house, complicated by non-vegetation burning of cars, fences, decks, garages, stacked firewood, and often-hazardous materials typically found on interface industrial properties, workshops and garden sheds, or even gas stations. Frightened residents trying to evacuate on limited access routes, often with uncoordinated communications and plans, simply multiply the crisis.
Pacific Northwest risk map: Clearly illustrated here is the band of interface-populated communities that runs down from the northeast corner of Washington to the southwest corner of Oregon — adjacent to and in forested areas.
Unlike the larger metro areas (Seattle, Portland), these communities are surrounded by rural and forested land, and consist mainly of smaller communities with limited suppression resources, and sometimes challenging water supply or prevention resources.
… and … 6 years later:
Interface fires in Northwest communities at risk fir catastrophic interface fire
Only a few of those ranked community exposure locations were NOT burned by a large interface fire. Ellensburg, Washington, suffered multiple fires, as did Spokane, Grants Pass, and Chelan.
Joe Stutler
A Western Region Co-Chair for the Wildland Fire Cohesive Strategy, Joe Stutler worked 35 years with the U.S. Forest Service. Since retiring, he’s worked for Northtree Fire International and as senior forester with Deschutes County for 8 years. He has worked as a hotshot, smokejumper, district and forest FMO, district ranger, law enforcement officer, and regional fire operations specialist for both R5 and R6. He put in 33 years as Type I and II Incident Commander and 6 years on National Area Command Teams. He has managed all-hazard and law enforcement assignments across the country and currently fills Command and General positions on Type 1 IMTs and Area Command teams.
Here are a few of Joe Stutler’s thoughts on these risk assessments: I am wide-eyed at the accuracy of Rick Stratton’s predictions and the big fires that followed in 2018-2022. Most of these high-ranking landscapes were in Fire Regimes 1 & 2, and those that have been burned by large intense wildfire have now reset to Condition Class 1. But what about those that remain in Condition Class 3, like here in central Oregon and other places in the U.S.?
The wildland fire environment is rapidly changing, and this slide deck shows that to be true. The question is, what can we in the business of helping people understand it actually do about it? The answer lies in collectively and strategically communicating these issues.
From my world, I immediately think about how the Cohesive Strategy has been affirmed by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) AND the President’s Wildfire Mitigation and Management Commission as THE strategic framework that can be applied at and by every level (federal, tribal, state, local, and NGOs) to address wildland fire challenges to make substantial, meaningful progress toward landscape resiliency, community resiliency, and fire adaptation — and a safer, more effective, risk-based wildfire response.
The part that stands out to me (apart from the obvious needs to increase the pace and scale of landscape resiliency treatments and address the different response approaches and needs of the “urban firestorm” probability) is the need for doubling down toward the CS goal of fire-adapted communities. The goal is described as “communities that are as prepared as possible to receive, respond to, and recover from wildland fire.”
This elevates the responsibility for preparedness to more than just our response as land management agencies and organizations, but to us as residents, responders, planners, emergency managers, governments, businesses, news outlets, and other organizations in communities. We each have a responsibility to think about what RECEIVING FIRE, RESPONDING TO FIRE, and RECOVERING FROM FIRE means to each of these community affiliates — and start heading down the path of preparation. These are ripe for defining within communities and providing suggestions for action. The definitions and suggestions will be different in every community, and we can organize and assist with these conversations, suggestions, and actionable solutions.
Many best practices have been applied and are underway across the West by all these entities, but the devastating destruction of entire communities over the last decade tells us that there is still much to do at the community level to prepare for wildland fire. Even today, many communities across the West — and for that matter east of the Mississippi — still do not realize that not only is the wildfire risk high, but there is also high likelihood of loss given the rapidly changing wildland fire environment. A changing climate (hotter, drier, windier conditions) alone is making “urban firestorms” a more prevalent reality, even in the East and South.
It’s clear that we need efforts toward all three goals of the Cohesive Strategy to make a difference and change the outcomes of wildland fire. Our vision is a good place to start — “To safely and effectively extinguish fire, when needed; use fire where allowable; manage our natural resources; and collectively, learn to live with wildland fire.” If we as individuals are truly learning to live with wildland fire, we must consider what that looks like in the face of the research and outcomes that Rick Stratton shares and then apply the Cohesive Strategy for better fire outcomes.
Ignoring our responsibility to learn to live with wildland fire is a choice. And we now know what the outcomes of that are.
Quebec and Ontario’s environmentally crucial boreal forests had a tough wildfire season in 2023. The provinces had 12.8 million and 1.1 million acres burn, respectively.
The 44 million acres burned by wildfires across Canada have been attributed mainly to abnormal drought and high temperatures, but a new study is pointing to another possible factor: the planting of millions of acres of immature trees after widespread logging. A recent study published by researchers at Australia’s Griffith University found more than 35 million acres of Canada’s forests have been lost to logging since 1976, including 20 million acres in Quebec and 14 million acres in Ontario.
The “loss” wasn’t caused by deforestation, which is “land that has been cleared of trees and permanently converted to another use” under Canada’s definition. Rather, the forest has been lost to forest degradation, or the conversion of naturally regenerating forest to plantations of planted trees.
“The Canadian Government claims that its forests have been managed according to the principles of sustainable forest management for many years,” the researchers said, “yet this notion of sustainability is tied mainly to maximizing wood production and ensuring the regeneration of commercially desirable tree species following logging,”
Overview of logged forest within the study area for the period ~1976 to 2020.
The decrease in the land area of older, more resilient forests across both Quebec and Ontario — and their subsequent replacement with immature trees — both lowered overall forest biodiversity and increased the prevalence of disturbances (wildfire, insect infestations, disease spread) over time.
“Logging has significantly increased the rate of disturbances in this region,” the report said. “This decrease in older forests when compared with historical natural conditions is accompanied by the resulting decline in structural attributes — such as large live and dead standing trees and coarse woody debris associated with older forests — which negatively affects biodiversity.”
Quebec and Ontario’s environmentally crucial boreal forests had a tough wildfire season in 2023. The provinces had 12.8 million and 1.1 million acres burn, respectively.
The 44 million acres burned by wildfires across Canada have been attributed mainly to abnormal drought and high temperatures, but a new study is pointing to another possible factor: the planting of millions of acres of immature trees after widespread logging. A recent study published by researchers at Australia’s Griffith University found more than 35 million acres of Canada’s forests have been lost to logging since 1976, including 20 million acres in Quebec and 14 million acres in Ontario.
The flames have died out on Alaska’s largest river delta, but emissions are still seeping out of the tundra’s ground.
A recent NASA study found that methane “hot spots” in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta are more likely to be found where wildfires burned into the tundra. The greenhouse gas reportedly originates from decomposing carbon stored in the tundra’s permafrost for thousands of years.
“We find that [methane] hotspots are roughly 29 percent more likely on average in tundra that burned within the last 50 years compared with unburned areas, and that this effect is nearly tripled along burn scar perimeters that are delineated by surface water features,” the researchers said. “Our results indicate that the changes following tundra fire favor the complex environmental conditions needed to generate emission hotspots.”
Mackenzie Delta, Northwest Territories
The correlation also nearly tripled in areas where fires burned to the edge of a lake, stream, or other body of standing water, according to NASA. The highest ratio of methane hot spots occurred in recently burned wetlands. Researchers detected roughly 2 million hot spots across 11,583 square miles. The team believes more hot spots could soon emerge.
“By some projections, the fire risk in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta could quadruple by the end of the century due to warming conditions and increased lightning storms – the leading cause of tundra fires,” they said.
Alaska had two of its largest tundra fires ever in 2022. The East Fork Fire ignited on May 31 after a lightning strike, and burned more than 150,000 acres along the Yukon River. The Apoon Pass Fire, the second largest, burned 84,130 acres.
Previous research found that the majority of yearly methane emissions from Alaska’s tundra occur during the cold season between September and May, indicating that total emissions are sensitive to soil climate and snow depth.
A devastating series of wildfires that swept over forests in Idaho, Montana, and Washington more than a century ago — the Big Burn of 1910 — would forever change the nation’s perception of fire in forests. The lessons learned from that tragedy, however, may have been a bit misguided, according to new research.
Firefighters had been putting out fires for months in 1910 throughout the Western states. They’d finally begun to get ahead during the week of August 19, even beginning to dismiss some firefighters, according to the Forest History Society.
But then all hell broke loose. Hurricane-force winds roared across the states, turning numerous smoldering embers into firestorms.
“A forester wrote of flames shooting hundreds of feet in the air, fanned by a tornadic wind so violent that the flames flattened out ahead, swooping to earth in great darting curves, truly a veritable red demon from hell,” according to a summary document by the USFS.
What became known as the “Big Blowup of 1910” is largely remembered for killing 86 people (78 of whom were firefighters), burning 3 million acres, and completely destroying eight towns.
Wallace, Idaho — the aftermath
The fire burned its way into the American conscious, one of the first widely reported wildfire tragedies in the nation’s budding national news system.
Three future Forest Service chiefs were directly involved in the Big Blowup, including W.B.Greeley, Henry Graves, and Ferdinand Silcox, and their experience would go on to shape decades of policy around aggressive fire suppression in U.S. forests. Not only has research shown aggressive suppression to be an ill-advised effort, but the heightened focus on fires in the nation’s forests may have also been misguided.
New research found rising wildfire risk for houses across the United States, with the number of homes within wildfire perimeters doubling since the 1990s, caused by both housing growth and more burned areas. Researchers also got a surprising finding from their study: grassland and shrubland fires destroyed far more houses than those lost to forest fires.
“This pattern was most pronounced in the Western U.S., which encompassed 69 percent of all the buildings destroyed by wildfires,” the researchers wrote. “There, 79.5 percent of all destroyed buildings were lost in grassland and shrubland fires. In the East, by contrast, 82.1 percent of destroyed buildings were lost in forest fires. In the West, even though forests had a high destruction rate (21.3 percent), only 2,367 buildings were destroyed by forest fires compared with 9,402 in grassland and shrubland fires.”
The researchers noted multiple potential reasons for the heightened number of homes destroyed by grassland and shrubland wildfires compared with forest wildfires, including the sheer acreage of grasslands and shrublands throughout the country. From 1990 to 2020, grassland and shrubland accounted for 64 percent of the total area burned by wildfires at ~91 million acres, while forests made up only 27 percent of burned areas at ~34 million acres.
Another reason is the difference in vegetation in the two environments. Wildfire management across grassland and shrublands requires frequent application of multiple types of risk-management strategies, including prescribed burning and fuel thinning, compared with forests — because of the quick recovery of fuel loads in grassland areas. The risk-management strategies, however, may not be advisable in all grasslands and shrublands, specifically those where fire-prone invasive species have replaced native vegetation.
In the West, 79.5 percent of all destroyed buildings were lost in grassland and shrubland fires.
Despite more homes being destroyed by grassland and shrubland wildfires, homes near forest wildfires reportedly have an above-average chance of being destroyed.
“Of the 151,725 buildings … that were exposed to wildfires from 2000 to 2013, 11.3 percent were destroyed,” researchers said. “However, buildings in evergreen and in mixed forests were almost twice as likely to be destroyed (20.1 and 22.9 percent, respectively). By contrast, the destruction rate for shrublands was similar to the average (12.7 percent), and rates for grasslands and deciduous forests were considerably lower (8.0 and 3.3 percent, respectively).”
Researchers believe this is the case partly because of forest wildfires’ higher intensity, but also couldn’t rule out the difference in the architecture of homes built in forests compared with homes built in grasslands and shrublands.
The study concluded by noting that stricter construction standards and land-use planning, specifically avoiding building in areas prone to fire, would help the Forest Service meet its goal of limiting wildfire risk for newly developed housing.
