High mountain forests have few cars, homes and power lines that could spark fires, and humans have historically done little to clear brush there or fight fires that could interfere with natural fire regimes. Wildfires in the high mountains in recent decades provide another way to look at the role that rising temperatures play in increasing fire activity. The 2018 fire that destroyed Paradise, Calif., began as a small vegetation fire that ignited new fires as the wind blew its embers. Almost all these catastrophes occurred during dry, hot, windy conditions that have become increasingly frequent because of climate change. In California, which was in drought during much of that period, several wildfire catastrophes hit communities that had existed long before 2000. The total burned area increased only 38%, but the locations of intense fires near towns and cities put lives at risk. Three-quarters of that 125% increase in exposure was due to fires’ increasingly encroaching on existing communities. It’s also a reminder of what’s at risk from human activities, such as fireworks on July 4, a day when wildfire ignitions spike. That knowledge has implications for how communities prepare to fight wildfires in the future, how they respond to population growth and whether policy changes such as increasing insurance premiums to reduce losses will be effective. Smoke rises from a brush fire near Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles in 2007. Instead, three-quarters of this trend was driven by intense fires growing out of control and encroaching on existing communities. Those statistics reflect how the number of people directly exposed to wildfires more than doubled from 2000 to 2019, my team’s new research shows.īut while commentators often blame the rising risk on homebuilders pushing deeper into the wildland areas, we found that the population growth in these high-risk areas explained only a small part of the increase in the number of people who were exposed to wildfires. Nearly 600,000 of them were directly exposed to the fire, with their homes inside the wildfire perimeter. Most of those residents would have had to evacuate, and many would have been exposed to smoke and emotional trauma from the fire. ( The Conversation) – Over the past two decades, a staggering 21.8 million Americans found themselves living within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of a large wildfire.

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