This year, California had an unprecedentedly bad year for wildfires. With extreme drought and rising average temperatures, wildfires seem like they will be an increasingly large part of future ecosystems. However, our current methods for wildfire prevention and fighting wildfires might be flawed, a new study from UC Berkeley shows.
Currently, wildfire scientists use methods like thinning forests and having "prescribed" burns, or controlled wildfires that are made on purpose to lower the amount of burnable brush, to prevent wildfires. A new UC Berkeley paper, published today, November 6, in the journal Nature, posits a different solution however. Instead of trying to fight wildfires, we should learn to co-exist with them, treating them more as how we treat earthquakes.
"We don't try to 'fight' earthquakes - we anticipate them in the way we plan communities, build buildings and prepare for emergencies. We don't think that way about fire, but our review indicates that we should," said lead author Max Moritz. Moritz is a specialist in fire at UC Berkeley.
Moritz said that the only way to lower the loss of human life and property damage from wildfire is to avoid using land that tends to have wildfires, the same way we take flood-risk and earthquake-risk into account when planning how to use land.
The authors of the paper suggested that people be strongly discouraged from building in areas with the highest risk of wildfires. They also suggested that building codes should be updated to reflect the risk for wildfire: new buildings in fire-prone areas should be required to be fire-resistant, and buildings that already exist in fire-prone areas should be modified to be fire-resistant.
The team also recommended making systemic changes to wildfire-prone areas, like adding certain kinds of vegetation around buildings in areas with high risk to reduce the spread of fires, and keeping up-to-date evacuation plans in case of wildfire.
The authors of the study also noted that wildfires can have positive effects on ecosystems, such as sparking new growth in vegetation, and creating new habitats for some species.
It may take a while to implement these policies, but parts of the world are in dire need of making a change in how they handle wildfires. In September, the governor of California declared a state of emergency because of wildfires.
