A recent paper from the Forest Service predicts higher costs for fire fighting.
The title: Economic Risks: Forest Service Estimates Costs of Fighting Wildfires in a Hotter Future.
The Climate Financial Risk report published by the White House Office of Management and Budget provides some estimates. A middle-of-the-road estimate is a 42% increase in suppression costs by 2050, to $3.9 billion, while some estimates expect the price tag to increase by 84%.
Forest Service researchers predict wildfires will be larger, more numerous, and increasingly expensive. This should not surprise anyone.
Climate change enhances conditions promoting wildfires, such as higher temperatures, lower humidity, drought, and wind.
The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are the lead fire suppression agencies. The average annual cost of fire suppression on these public lands is nearly $3 billion.
“We analyzed ten future climate scenarios and a wide range of projections for fire extent and fire suppression spending,” said Jeff Prestemon of the Forest Service Southern Research Station.
Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. The wildfire season has lengthened, so much so that we now refer to it as a fire year. According to Prestemon, these changes are projected to intensify.
The study estimates that lands in the National Forest System may see a doubling of the area burned by mid-century. In one scenario, the area burned by wildfire might quadruple.
The Forest Service uses these projections to justify more logging and burning of federal lands. In 2023, the Forest Service “treated” more than 4.3 million acres of “hazardous” (read wildlife habitat and carbon storage) fuels nationwide.
The study’s authors promote the myth that prescribed burning is a solution.
“Understanding and reducing wildfire risk is a key focus of our land management strategies. One of the most effective tools for this strategy—prescribed fire–is also essential to the health of many forest ecosystems.”
The problem is that thinning, logging, and prescribed burning does nothing to influence climate, driving the increase in wildfire acreage charred.
One of the most critical issues is that most wildfires never encounter a fuel reduction, whether from thinning or prescribed burns. So, even if prescribed burns were effective, fires seldom occur in treated areas.
Indeed, it can enhance fire spread. Thinning the forest opens up the canopy, allowing more sun to penetrate the forest floor, drying out litter and increasing the water stress on plants.
Thinning also allows greater wind penetration. Wind is the most critical factor in fire spread.
Thinning also removes forest carbon and often releases it into the atmosphere immediately—even charred trees from wildfire store carbon for decades to centuries.
Moreover, a recent study estimated that up to 10 times as much carbon is released by logging as natural disturbances (like wildfire). For instance, 66% of the carbon losses across the West were due to logging, while only 15% was due to wildfire. Thus, logging contributes more climate warming CO2 than wildfires.
Prescribed burning influence is short-lived. Depending on the ecosystem, within a few years, vegetation regrowth may exceed what existed before burning.
For example, one study conducted in California Sierra Nevada found that within two years after a spring season burn, the herbaceous vegetation in the prescribed burn area did not differ from non-burned controls.
Furthermore, the plants that regrow are often called “fine fuels,” like grasses and shrubs that ignite easily.
Most advocates of prescribed burning never mention that due to this rapid regrowth of fuels, any area burned must be retreated frequently forever.
As for the pronouncement that “prescribed burning is “essential to the health of many forest ecosystems,” but this statement ignores the fact that nearly all plant communities in the West have long fire rotations, and while wildfire is natural, frequent burning is not “normal.”
The idea that Indian cultural burning kept the West’s ecosystems healthy is another myth.
Numerous studies have shown that Indian burning was primarily local, typically around village sites and other high-use areas, raising doubts about its effectiveness in reducing wildfires across the landscape.
Large blazes are recorded even when Native Americans occupied the landscape and were presumably active in cultural burning. A study in the Siskiyou Mountains of northern California and southern Oregon examining a 2000-year sediment record found that 77% of 68 major fires occurred before Euro-American settlement.
The areas charred by tribal burns were seldom of a landscape scale, thus not a major ecological force.
Furthermore, this ignores the fact that most of the West ecosystems evolved without human ignitions. For instance, ponderosa pine, one of the forest types often cited as “needing” frequent human ignitions, existed for 55 million years as a separate species. Still, humans only colonized North America perhaps 15,000 or so years ago. How did ponderosa pine survive all these years without human manipulation?
Beyond doing something to shift the warming climate trend by reducing fossil fuel consumption, a far better funding expenditure would involve home-hardening communities.
How do you reduce the flammability of communities? You install flame-resistant roofing materials, screen vents, clean gutters of flammable materials, and keep wooden fences and other burnable materials away from homes. Just putting a five-foot gravel perimeter around home foundations has been highly effective at reducing home fires.
Restrictions on constructing homes in the wildlands interface would also significantly reduce fire ignitions from powerlines and other human sources. This is a zoning and planning issue that can be implemented immediately.
Eliminating logging roads is another key because nearly all human sources of wildfire ignitions occur near roads. Of these human-caused wildfires, 95% occurred within ½ mile of a road. Roads put more people in the forest matrix where everything from an untended campfire to grass fires from hot exhaust pipes can ignite the woods.
The failure of “active forest management,” i.e., logging to alter wildfire outcomes, is one reason why more than 200 scientists wrote a letter to Congress: “Removing trees can alter a forest’s microclimate, and can often increase fire intensity. In contrast, forests protected from logging, and those with high carbon biomass and carbon storage, more often burn at equal or lower intensities when fires do occur.”
Combined with a rational fire policy, we can reduce the cost of fire suppression and home losses and maintain healthy ecosystems without degrading our forests with inappropriate logging and manipulation.
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