Wildfire trends outpace mitigation measures

USA – There is no silver bullet solution when it comes to adapting communities to wildfire in Montana and across the West, experts told state lawmakers, as trends suggest a future conducive to more extreme fire conditions.

The Environmental Quality Council, a legislative interim committee that covers natural resource policy, held a wildfire panel last week to hear about trends, mitigation and potential policy implications. The meeting comes as much of Montana faces widespread drought and pushes by state and federal officialsto increase the pace and scale of forest management.

Philip Higuera, professor of fire ecology at the University of Montana, described the current recipe putting many communities in the West at risk.

“So we’re living among flammable vegetation and we’re starting fires in that vegetation,” Higuera told the council.

Wildfire cannot be framed as the problem alone, he continued, noting that fire on the landscape has shaped ecosystems for millions of years. Also much of the West remains wild where fires may burn and not turn into human disasters. But climate trends suggest more conditions for extreme wildfire behavior — dry, hot, windy and low relative humidity.

“What this does is it loads the dice in a way for opportunities for extensive burning. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to have fires but the opportunity for fire will exist more days per year and more days per decade,” Higuera said, pointing to recent major fire years like 2017 and 2012. “… In addition, the scale of fire across the West and in Montana is so large that we can’t expect to reverse this trend.”

With tens of thousands of acres burning annually on average, Higuera emphasized the importance of prioritizing mitigation measures where human safety is a primary concern.

“The reason we need to prioritize is because the extent at which fires impact our landscape far outpaces our ability to do something across all of those areas so we really need to focus in at what’s going to help communities,” he said.

With its large population, California has seen significant issues trying to mitigate wildfire, said John Radke with the University of California at Berkeley.

“It’s getting more and more difficult dealing with fire on the urban edge,” he told the council.

After some prescribed fires escaped containment, officials put a moratorium on the tool. Efforts to enact building codes aimed at saving homes from fires have ultimately not proved effective, Radke said.

When it comes to mitigation, Mark Finney, a U.S. Forest Service researcher forester with the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, told the council that logging or thinning alone has not been shown to prevent large fires burning under extreme conditions. He detailed several fires in which logged areas burned alongside unlogged areas. The key mitigation found to be successful at mitigating fire was previous fire, he said.

“If we stop (at logging or thinning), if we do not follow with prescribed burning, we don’t have a fuel treatment,” he said. “All of the evidence … over the past 80 years, all of the research has shown fire is the essential fuel treatment.”

Finney contends that it is society’s intolerance to fire, rather than encouraging helpful fires, that has led to a situation where fuel loads build and large fires become the most destructive. Rather than smaller fires burning more frequently, when a fire escapes initial attack and burns under the most extreme conditions is when it becomes the most destructive. He also noted that prescribed fires release fewer emissions than large wildfires.

Finney’s research suggests that 30-50% of a landscape would need to be treated in order to effectively mitigate wildfire.

“In order to get to that level it’s going to take decades of activities, both intentional management but also using opportunities from unplanned ignitions to achieve that,” he said. “There are important policy implications in trying to achieve that level of landscape management, but if such a thing could be done, we’d expect we may have a lot more fire on our landscapes but the fires themselves would not have the damaging impact to watersheds or our communities.”