Wildfires continue to rage on and are predicted to worsen

Kori Walters
MC301 Contributor

This wildfire season in the United States has proved more devastating than any other on record. Climate experts worldwide predicted this, and believe that it will only get worse.

To most, the severity of these wildfires has been shocking. Rayvn Basinger, a senior biology premed major from Inglewood, Calif. says that she has noticed the increase in wildfires and that it is “mind-blowing.” That being said, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted this.

In 2018, the IPCC released their Special Report on Climate Change and Land. This report covers all of the irreversible effects of climate change that these scientists expected to see in the future, and what we could do to slow the damage.

In this report, the IPCC stated that recent heat-related events have been made more frequent or intense. They also stated that future climate variability [is] expected to enhance the risk and severity of wildfires in many biomes.

Biologist Daisy Dune explains in an article for Carbon Brief that the link between more severe wildfires and climate change is based on the average rise in temperature.

Dune says the increase in temperature has dried out plants, leading to tinderbox conditions – meaning that, if a fire is sparked, it can spread very quickly over large areas.

The “tinderbox” issue exists in many areas already. It has a direct relation to the Australian bushfires (from June 2019 to March 2020), as well as many fires seen in the United States.

Basinger said the terrain in the southern region [of California] is practically a deserted area and lacks rain in the day-to-day forecast. This creates ideal tinderbox conditions.

The IPCC further explains this. They say that drought remains the dominant driver of fire emissions, but the appearance of fires in less usual areas is because warmer temperatures can “increase vegetation flammability. This explains how the Amazon rainforest could be absolutely devastated by a series of wildfires over the past year.

Ana Batista, a senior earth science major from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, said that in addition to the Amazon, an area known as the Pantanal is also burning.

“It is completely out of control. This area is not known for having fires,” said Batista.

While the outlook on wildfires seems dim, the IPCC did release suggestions to slow climate change in their Summary for Policymakers. However, many governments choose not to take the IPCC seriously because the changes that need to be made are considered too inconvenient.

For example, in the Summary for Policymakers, the IPCC states that practicing sustainable land management will not only slow some of the negative effects of climate change, but will also decrease evidence of those negative effects.

That being said, sustainable land management directly interferes with the way most capitalistic societies currently operate. For decades governments have struggled to settle on policies that are equally environmentally and economically friendly.

As for the areas that are already being affected by wildfires, there are several simple policies that can be implemented. Basinger suggests that in California especially, the government specifies designated areas to smoke that are a good distance from dry plants.

Some places already have fire preventative policies that other areas can adopt. Batista says that in Brazil it is illegal to burn old crops because it is likely to lead to a wildfire. In Oregon, the sale and use of large fireworks is prohibited because these fireworks have been the cause of many wildfires in the past.

While effort needs to be put into preventing wildfires, that is a minor fix to a major problem. The focus needs to be on what can be done to slow climate change, thus slowing the creation of dry environments.