Wildfires are an apex climate challenge. Let me tell you why.
They are getting bigger and more extreme as the world heats up. There’s been a lot of fuel built up due to old, extreme suppression strategies. A warming planet results in drier fuel that combusts faster and reach uncontainable intensity. In turn, Wildfires have unilaterally reversed California's emission trajectory in the wrong direction.
Not only does this result in awe-inducing bright orange infernos, but the damage is done in multiple huge ways.
Wildfires have multiple negative planet-scale effects:
They are a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. Estimated to be 5% of global emissions, nearly two times more than Germany.
They destroy huge amounts of our best at-scale carbon sink: trees. 1/3 of the Sierra Nevada is estimated to have been destroyed due to fire and drought.
They create terrible, hazardous air quality that can move around the world and affect the health of hundreds of millions of people. The recent Canadian wildfires alone are estimated to have affected the air quality of over 100 Million people. 90 million in the USA were under air quality alerts last week.
Their smoke reduces output from solar energy, which then drives up use of natural gas and other base load energy sources. Smoke from the Californian fires in September 2020 resulted in 27% less peak production.
They destroy incredible amounts of biodiversity. Over 3 Billion animals were estimated to have been displaced or killed during the 2019 Australian wildfires.
They take away blue skies. California is changing from the Golden State to the Grey State during late summer and fall. That loss of blue skies is a palpable hit to mental health for millions, as many New Yorkers can now empathize with.
This is all in addition to the trauma of people getting killed and losing their homes.
But, there’s hope too because there is leverage:
I estimate that 44% of acres burned in California in the last decade come from only 15 fires. If we do 50% better just 15 times, we can reduce acres burned by over 20% in California.
There’s lots of areas to tweak: forest management, resilience, detection, early response, containment, and re-seeding. While overall greenhouse emissions will take time to get better, the results of fuel management can be felt in a few years.
Improvements compound across all the categories listed above. Less uncontrolled wildfire means fewer humans with terrible air quality, more solar power being generated, and more intentional retention of carbon sinks.
Hemispheric arbitrage gives us two seasons every year to reflect, plan, and execute. Each fire represents a chance to iterate, experiment and improve. Experiments in Australia can inform strategies in Canada six months later.
This is a tractable coordination problem because there’s not too many actors. It’s not like Electric Vehicles or Heat Pumps where hundreds of millions of people need to individually be convinced and act. Fire Services and land managers are readily identifiable and have existing collaboration practices to build upon. A best practice can scale globally quite quickly with the right incentives in place.
Climate Change is a big, urgent problem where action this year matters more than action next year. Wildfires are a huge area of opportunity to get involved with.