US wildfires threaten more people than ever

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CLIMATE WIRE | More than half a million Americans faced catastrophic wildfires between 2000 and 2019 — partly because they lived in high wildfire risk areas, but also because the fires s are worsening and encroaching on areas once considered low-risk, research shows.

These findings, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, reflect what Boise State University experts call “cumulative primary human exposure” to wildfires. It’s a sobering indicator of how close wildfires are to populated areas, a situation that will worsen as the planet warms.

“It’s a wildfire spiraling out of control,” said Mojtaba Sadegh, assistant professor of civil engineering at Boise State and lead author of the study published this month. “In many cases, the populations were already there, but the climate [conditions] were not ripe for frequent forest fires. Now they are.

More than 8 in 10 people in the most at-risk areas — those within a “wildfire perimeter” — lived in western states, including California, the researchers found. But more than 106,000, or 18%, of those facing catastrophic risk were in states ranging from the Great Plains to Florida.

“Our findings underscore that deliberate mitigation and adaptation efforts to help societies cope with wildfires are increasingly needed,” the study said.

Researchers looked at data from more than 15,000 wildfires in the lower 48 states between 2000 and 2019, then used population distribution data to estimate the number of people exposed to those fires. The results show that the exposure of the primary population to wildfires increased by 125% in the continental United States during these 20 years.

The researchers warned there were “large statistical uncertainties” in the trend analysis due to the study’s relatively short timeframe, but Sadegh said it was clear wildfires were increasing in intensity and in frequency due to climate change.

Modeling and analysis of data from independent groups such as the First Street Foundation have drawn similar conclusions about the expansion of wildfire risk.

Although particular attention was paid to the encroachment of houses in fire-prone areas, the researchers found that an “increased extent of wildfires was driving the majority of the observed trends”.

In fact, only 24% of people facing the highest wildfire risk between 2000 and 2019 settled in a fire-prone region, according to the Boise State study. Seventy-six percent already lived in what they thought were reasonably safe communities. “These people had no idea how dramatically wildfire dynamics would change over their lifetimes,” Sadegh said in an interview.

Beyond the immediate threats to life and property, health experts have warned of the indirect impacts of the wildfires, including contamination of drinking water, mudslides and debris and the smoke inhalation.

Tens of millions of Americans this summer have seen with their own eyes how smoke from wildfires affects human health. Smoke from wildfires in Canada has covered much of the United States in recent weeks, including the East Coast where this kind of disaster is rare, at least for now.

“The eastern United States hasn’t seen the worst of it yet,” Sadegh said. “Projections show that future wildfires in the East are expected to increase [with climate change]and the fires there will be larger and more intense.

Fires like those in Canada could become common in forests from Maine to Minnesota as conditions become hotter and drier, experts say. Northern Minnesota’s Upper National Forest, for example, has seen a marked increase in wildfires, including a 93,000-acre blaze in 2011 in the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Sadegh said the findings have immediate implications for local, state and federal agencies tasked with maintaining firefighting infrastructure and human resources, as well as managing wildfire evacuations. Insurers are also increasingly aware of the risk of wildfires, especially in places like California, leading to higher premiums and even policy cancellations.

“It’s something we have to live with; it’s not going to go away, especially in the next two decades,” he said. “We need to think about how we become more resilient to this.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential information for energy and environmental professionals.

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