Wildfires have grown substantially in size in recent decades, but they’re also burning much more intensely, with high severity areas growing much faster than fires overall. New research projects additional significant jumps in the scale of wildfires that kill most trees unless major management measures - like prescribed fire - are carried out.
High severity wildfires present major threats to ecosystems, including the loss of forested lands, according to a recent study published in the journal Global Change Biology.
“Without a substantial expansion of management activities that effectively reduce fire severity, wildfires will increasingly drive forest loss and degrade ecosystem services including carbon storage, biodiversity conservation, and water yield, with major impacts to human communities,” the study reads.
Since the mid-1980s, the number of forested acres burned annually by wildfires has grown by roughly tenfold. But lead author Sean Parks says that the area burned by high-severity blazes – those that kill all or most trees – grew even faster: fifteen-fold.
“The reason why we care about these types of fires is that – especially with climate change – forests that are burning in a manner that kills all or most trees are having a more and more difficult time returning to forests,” he said.
And without a significant policy response, the situation will only worsen.
“We project a 2.9-fold increase in area burned by mid-century and a four-fold increase in area burned severely,” he explained, adding that the notably large and intense 2021 and 2022 seasons would be “average conditions” in that scenario.
He called the findings a “call to arms” for “a massive investment in our public lands, a massive investment to make our forests more resilient to the inevitable fire.”
“The science is very clear that thinning of the small understory trees, plus prescribed fire, makes our forests more resilient to inevitable fire and will reduce the probability that the inevitable fire will be a stand-replacing or high-severity fire.”
And “the longer we wait” to do that, he warned, the more forests we’ll lose.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
