Extreme wildfires are here to stay and multiply

LONDON, Feb 23 (BUS): Severe wildfires have ravaged Indonesia’s peatlands, California’s forests and now, vast swaths of wetlands in Argentina, heralding a fiery future and the desperate need to prevent it.

With climate change causing droughts and farmers clearing forests, the number of severe wildfires is expected to increase by 30% over the next 28 years. They are now scorching environments that were not prone to burning in the past, such as the arctic tundra and the Amazon rainforest.

“We have seen a significant increase in recent fires in northern Syria, northern Siberia, the eastern side of Australia and India,” said Andrew Sullivan, an Australian government bushfire scientist and editor of the report, which was released by the United Nations Environment Program on Wednesday. and GRID-Arendal Environmental Communications Group.

At the same time, the slow disappearance of the cool, humid nights that once helped cool fires also means they are harder to put out, according to a second study published last week in Nature.

With nighttime temperatures rising faster than daytime temperatures over the past four decades, researchers found a 36% increase in the number of after-dark hours that were warm and dry enough for a fire to last.

“This is a mechanism for the fires getting bigger and more extreme,” said Jennifer Balch, lead author of the nature study and director of the Earth Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder, according to Reuters.

“Exhausted firefighters don’t get rest,” which means they can’t regroup and revise strategies for dealing with a fire.

The consequences of severe fires are wide-ranging, from loss and damage to a costly firefighting response. In the United States alone, a United Nations Environment Program report said the economic burden of wildfires is $347 billion annually.

With California’s forests burning, the state government spent an estimated $3.1 billion putting out the fires in the 2020-21 fiscal year.

Fires raging since December in Argentina’s Corrientes province have taken a heavy toll, killing wildlife in Ibera National Park, charring pastures and livestock, and destroying crops including yerba mate, fruit and rice. The Argentine Rural Association said losses had already exceeded 25 billion Argentine pesos ($234 million).

The UN Environment Program report called on governments to rethink spending on wildfires, and recommended that they allocate 45% of their budget to prevention and preparedness, 34% toward responding to firefighting, and 20% toward recovery.

“In many regions of the world, most resources are geared towards response – they are focused on the short term,” said Paulo Fernandez, a contributing author on the UN Environment report and a fire scientist at the University of Tras-os-Montes and Alto Douro in Portugal. .

HF