Wildfires and other fire incidents

[weatheriscool]

[Tadasuke]

According to a new article on Our World In Data, wildfires around the world are actually less common in the last few years than they were in the 2000s.

[wjfox]

According to a new article on Our World In Data, wildfires around the world are actually less common in the last few years than they were in the 2000s.

A nice attempt by you to minimise the impacts of climate change, but here's what the article had to say:

"...this is largely driven by a decline in burn rates in grasslands and savannas as a result of the expansion and intensification of agriculture.

This highlights the strong role that human activity and land use management play in wildfire extent, alongside weather- and climate-related factors. Both factors must be considered when trying to minimize the damage of increasing fire risk in a changing climate."

[Tadasuke]

Share of land area used for agriculture, 1961 to 2020: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/shar ... griculture

Agricultural area over the long-term, 1600 to 2023: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tota ... -long-term

Agricultural land is the sum of cropland and land used as pasture for grazing livestock. Agricultural land per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agri ... per-capita

This dataset is showing estimates of the total agricultural land area – which is the combination of cropland and grazing land – per person. It is measured in hectares per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tota ... per-person

Is agricultural land expanding? Change over the prior decade, 2021: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agri ... -less-land

Share of land area used for arable agriculture, 2020: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/shar ... griculture

Although a lot of land on Earth is dedicated to agriculture and pasture, land use per person is going down each decade. And precision fermentation can totally revolutionise how food is produced. For example, milk wouldn't come from animals, but from precision fermentation tanks, which would drastically reduced land and resources needed. Completely removing risk of wildfires may be impossible, but AI monitoring and robots fighting fires could lower chances of wildfires which have been happening for hundreds of millions of years so far.

[weatheriscool]

[caltrek]

Wildfire Risk Management in the Era of Climate Change
May 7, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) A Perspective explores lessons learned from recent deadly wildfires and proposes a strategy for managing wildfire risk. Wildfire risk and wildfire deaths are on the rise due to climate change, policies of fire suppression, and development in the wildland-urban interface. The August 8, 2023, fire that destroyed the historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii, claimed 98 lives, in part due to a failure to alert residents to the danger. In 2018, 104 lives were lost in a fire in Mati, Greece, for which there were also no alerts. For both incidents, Costas E. Synolakis and Georgios Marios Karagiannis argue that lives would have been saved had there been evacuation orders issued. In both cases, traffic was mismanaged, some victims perished in their cars, and some survivors who self-evacuated had to be rescued from nearby beaches. The authors propose a long-term strategy for integrating wildfire risk management into forest land management and note that large fires are often followed by investment in fire-fighting infrastructure, but not wildfire mitigation and prevention. Prevention and mitigation measures should be increased, the authors argue, including retrofitting buildings to meet or exceed building code standards, limiting development in the wildland-urban-interface, prescribed burning, fuel reduction, and forest thinning. The authors call for governments to work closely with the forest products industry to integrate land management and wildfire risk management as well as for a global system for reporting wildland-urban interface fires. In addition, public alert and warning systems need to be improved, along with evacuation plans, including plans for people with functional needs. The authors describe how scientists’ advocacy after the Mati and Maui catastrophes led to advances in each country’s wireless emergency alert systems. The authors argue that alerts should go out through multiple communication pathways including mobile and landline phones, radio, television, and highway variable message signs. According to the authors, authorities should also take advantage of new technologies, including machine learning, to forecast in real-time worst-case scenarios once fires start, along with Earth observation from satellites, to improve monitoring and predictive capabilities.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1043649

The study summarized in the above cited article also had the following direct things to say about climate change and wildfires:
Extract:

(PNAS Nexus)

Climate change and wildfire risk

Wildland fires have an intricate relationship with climate change. Bowman et al. (45) estimated that wildland fires are responsible for 19% of the anthropogenic radiative forcing. Climate change does yield higher temperatures and drier conditions that prime the landscape for fires to catch and spread more easily. Flannigan et al. (46) estimate that fire seasons will last 20 days per year longer in the northern high latitudes by the end of the century. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (47) notes that fire weather is expected to increase in many parts of the world and, a 2-degree global warming scenario is projected to increase burned area globally by 35%. These estimates are corroborated by regional studies, which point to an increase in the number of human-induced wildfires, burned area, and wildfire risk (21, 48–56).

These scenarios are hardly fictitious, as climate change is already increasing wildfire risk around the world. Fire-prone areas are extending poleward to areas previously unaffected. Jolly et al. (2015) found that, by 2013, fire seasons had lengthened in about one-quarter of the Earth's vegetated surface, resulting in an increase of the global average fire season length by 18.7%, compared to 1979. They also estimated that, between 1979 and 2013, the burnable area affected by longer fire weather seasons had doubled. Furthermore, the frequency of long fire-weather seasons increased across more than half of the global vegetated area between 1996 and 2013, compared with 1979–1996. Regional studies corroborate these global findings by showing an increase in the number of fires and the burned area during fire seasons, as well as in the size, extent, and frequency of large fires (49, 56–61). Consensus is emerging that the conventional suppression-centered wildfire and forest management strategies applied so far no longer efficiently address megafires, variously defined, but usually as fires that burn over 40,000 hectares.

Source: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/art ... gin=false