Extreme wildfires have ravaged Indonesia’s peatlands and California’s forests. Now, large swathes in Argentine wetland have been ravaged. This is a sign of a fiery future that must be stopped.
The number of wildfires will increase by 30% due to climate change, farmers clearing forests, and droughts. They are now burning areas that were not as prone to fire in the past, such the Arctic’s tundra or the Amazon rainforest. “We’ve seen a great increase in recent fires in northern Syria, northern Siberia, the eastern side of Australia, and India,” said Australian government bushfire scientist Andrew Sullivan, an editor on the report https://www.unep.org/resources/report/spreading-wildfire-rising-threat-extraordinary-landscape-fires, released Wednesday, by the UN Environment Programme and GRID-Arendal environmental communications group.
At the same time, the slow disappearance of cool, damp nights that once helped to temper fires also means they are getting harder to extinguish, according to a second study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04325-1 published last week in the journal Nature. Researchers found that night temperatures have increased faster than daytime temperatures over the past four decades. This led to a 36% increase of after-dark hours that are warm and dry enough to sustain fire.
Jennifer Balch (lead author of the Nature study, and director of University of Colorado Boulder’s Earth Lab), said, “This is a mechanism to fires to become bigger and more severe.” “Exhausted firefighters can’t get relief,” which means they don’t have the ability to regroup and revise strategies to tackle a fire.
The consequences of extreme fires can be devastating. They can cause loss and damage, as well cost-intensive firefighting efforts. The UNEP report estimates that wildfires cost the United States $347 billion annually. With California’s forests ablaze, the state government spent https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4285 an estimated $3.1 billion on fire suppression in the 2020-21 fiscal year.
The fires that have been raging in Argentina’s Corrientes region since December have caused a huge loss, killing Ibera National Park wildlife and charring pasturelands, livestock and crops. According to the Argentine Rural Society, losses have already exceeded 25 billion Argentine Pesos ($234 millions). UNEP’s report recommends governments rethink wildfire expenditures. It recommends they allocate 45% of their budget to prevention and preparedness and 34% to firefighting and response. 20% is for recovery.
Paulo Fernandes (a contributing author to the UNEP Report and fire scientist at Universidade of Alto Douro and Tras-os Monttes in Portugal) said that “in many regions of this world, most resources go towards responding they focus on the immediate.”
(This story was not edited by Devdiscourse staff. It is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.
