Nation must adapt to greater wildfire risk
Nation must adapt to greater wildfire risk
1 November 2007
published by www.csmonitor.com
USA — Climate change means people must prepare for more fire danger,including surprise US East.
Fire-wise: A man looked over the damage to a deck in San Diego County Oct. 23, where the home’s tile roof and apparent stucco construction no doubt prevented more serious damage.
Photo: Chris Carlson/AP Droughts, floods, severe storms, and sea-level rise often get the lion’s share of attention in the litany of projected effects from global warming. But October’s disastrous wildfires in California part of one of the most intense fire seasons in the United States in nearly 50 years are likely to raise the profile of such events, even if a firm link between the state’s fires and climate change has yet to be made.
Planning for how to adapt to larger and more frequent wildfires is under way. It includes building homes with fire-resistant roofs and windows, and landscaping with fire-resistant plants. It also means planning new communities with streets wide enough to handle evacuation traffic even when the curbs are lined with fire trucks.
It also means changing the way people think about their homes and surrounding property. And it means maintaining homes and property over time: Adapting to new wildfire risks is not a one-time event, experts say.
People who live in flood plains or hurricane zones generally “understandthe need to adapt and to build differently,” says James Smalley, who headsthe wildfire-protection program at the National Fire Prevention Association inQuincy, Mass. “But people who live in natural settings don’t quite get ityet that you can adapt, that you can still have a natural, beautiful setting.You have to understand that fire is part of the natural landscape. So you haveto adapt.”
Global warming is expected to increase fire hazards in the western UnitedStates under a range of global-warming scenarios. But the greatest increase inrisk, some researchers say, is likely to come in the East and Southeast. There,snowmelt and rainfall are unlikely to slake the increasing thirst of trees andshrubs as CO2 spurs their growth during longer, warmer growing seasons. Thiscould leave more of the eastern woodlands drier and more vulnerable to wildfiresby summer’s end. Meanwhile, some of the most dense mingling of homes and woods what experts call the wildland-urban interface can be found in theeastern US.
Money and manpower to deal with wildfires today is limited. That sometimescan means firefighters must use a kind of triage to decide what to do. Not onlyare homes and communities that prepare to resist wildfires more likely tosurvive with less damage, they also are more likely to attract attention fromfirefighters.
“Your first mind-set is to save them all,” says Michael Long,director of Florida’s state forest service. “But then when you get limitedresources, you look at [the homes] and say, ‘This is a winner; this is a loser.’When your resources get low, you’ve got to make decisions as to which ones youstand the best chance of saving.”
Well-prepared homes in one neighborhood can also free up firefighters to workon other parts of a blaze. According to press reports, for instance, the Witchfire in northern San Diego County swept right across one large housingdevelopment. Yet no home burned. Firefighters attributed the good news to theconsistent use of fire-resistant landscaping throughout the development.
But pinning the blame for southern California’s tragedy on global warming atthis stage is premature, says Anthony Westerling, an assistant professor at theUniversity of California at Merced and a lead investigator with the CaliforniaClimate Change Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla,Calif.
He and colleagues at the University of Arizona note that so far no researchhas identified a clear link between rising temperatures and wildfires insouthern California’s dry chaparral landscape. In a statement, the team notesthat “the connection between global warming, Santa Ana winds, and extremelylow southern California precipitation last winter are not known with sufficientcertainty to conclusively link global warming with this disaster.”
“We don’t know how much the dice are getting loaded” in favor ofsuch fire outbreaks in southern California, Dr. Westerling says in an interview.Computer models tend to agree that temperatures should warm, he says, but “theyare all over the place” on changes in precipitation.
Yet global warming’s fingerprints earlier springs, earlier snowmelts, andwarmer temperatures have been appearing in other forested areas, he adds. Ina study he and colleagues published in the journal Science in August 2006, theteam found a sudden, marked increase in the number and lifetime of fires, aswell as a longer fire season in the West generally especially during themid-1980s. These trends were particularly noticeable in forests in the northernRockies at middle elevations. There, the interaction of people with the forestecosystem which can have its own powerful effect on fires is far lesspronounced than in other parts of the West.
Indeed, model projections point to similar trends in Canada and Russia’simmense reaches of high-latitude forests, according to a research by a team ledby Amber Soja, a researcher at the National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
That global warming might bring a greater fire risk to the already aridWestern US might seem obvious. But the big surprise in the future may comefarther east, says Ronald Neilson, a bioclimatologist at the US Forest Service’sPacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Ore. It’s in the east andsoutheast where global-warming-related wildfire risks will grow the mostdramatically, his research suggests, even though the western US remains thecountry’s wildfire hot spot.
Two out of 5 US homes are on the front lines
Why? As temperatures warm, the growing season will get longer. Woodlands willgrow faster at least for a few decades fertilized by more atmosphericCO2. But annual precipitation amounts are expected to remain relatively constant.
Today, forests usually dry out just as the trees are going dormant for winter.In the future, however, eastern forests may dry long before the trees have achance to shut down. Combined with bark beetle infestations (themselves aproduct of warming temperatures; they have occurred in the southern and westernUS and recently moved east), an increasing number of eastern woodlands couldbecome prime wildfire fuel.
On a related front, two years ago, a team led by Volker Radeloff, a forestecologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, pulled together the firstnational assessment of the collision between development and wild lands. Theeffort was driven by increased concerns about wildfire risks, Dr. Radeloff says.
The team looked at 2000 census data and found that 44,348,628 homes nearly 39 percent of all the housing units in the lower 48 states were builtalong the wildland-urban interface. In some cases, these were single homes builton large tracts of forest or grassland. In other cases, they represented densedevelopments that bordered extended wild areas, such as national forests.
Agencies pool efforts to identify ‘fire-wise’ practices
The results were amazing, Radeloff says. “Because the West has thedrought, most of the discussions about the wildland-urban interface focused onthose states,” he says. “But when we look at absolute numbers, thereis much more wildland-urban interface in the East than in the West. That came asa major surprise to us.”
Combined with the projected effects of global warming on the eastern forests,this came as potentially troubling news. Little wonder, then, that severalfederal agencies and national associations have pooled their efforts to support”fire-wise” communities, spreading the word on what works and whatdoesn’t to make homes and communities more resistant to fires.
The solutions, experts says, don’t require rocket science. Good approachesare already out there. They just need to be applied more widely and consistently.
Mr. Smalley of the National Fire Prevention Association recalls a recentquery he received from the US Government Accountability Office inquiring aboutnew ways to reduce the risk of wildfires.
“They asked: ‘What new technology can we look forward to?’ I said thereis no new technology that will help. It comes down to good building [techniques]and good clearance around each home.”
