"We are not on track to reduce risk now," said Hamish Clarke, senior research fellow at the school of ecosystem and forest sciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia. "We need to change course urgently and seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions." Clarke co-authored an article in January 2022 on bushfire risk in Australia that argued "climate change is exceeding the capacity of our ecological and social systems to adapt," and that fire management is now at a "crossroads."
Fire has burnt through forests for hundreds of millions of years, but now unprecedented wildfires are burning hotter and longer, partly due to climate change. Declining rainfall and longer droughts are making forests so dry that localized lightening can spark a small fire that transforms into an inferno before firefighters can limit the damage. Firefighters are currently battling fierce forest fires ripping through Chile's Valparaiso region on the Pacific coast, which have killed at least 112 people.
In 2023, climate-change fueled fire ravaged Canada. Some 18.4 million hectares (45.5 million acres) burned, sending gigantic clouds of smoke over parts of the US. Summer 2023 also saw large fires break out in Italy, Greece and Spain. On the other side of the world, so large was the scale of the Australian Black Summer megafires of 2019-20 that burnt nearly 60 million acres (24 million hectares) that once fire-resistant wet forests also went up in flames.
Collection
[
|
...
]