Fire Suppression Makes Wildfires More Severe
Summary
WI PhD Candidate Mark Kreider and co-authors published "Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe and accentuates impacts of climate change and fuel accumulation" in Nature Communications. Their findings show that fighting every wildfire ensures that fires are more extreme, and may harm forests’ ability to adapt to climate change. Managing wildfires to safely burn under low and moderate conditions is thus a critical tool to address the growing wildfire crisis.
Mark also wrote a piece in The Conversation as well as a "Behind the Paper" blog post for Springer Nature. See media coverage in this article in The Hill and the Yale Environment 360 Digest.
Abstract
Fire suppression is the primary management response to wildfires in many areas globally. By removing less-extreme wildfires, this approach ensures that remaining wildfires burn under more extreme conditions. Here, we term this the “suppression bias” and use a simulation model to highlight how this bias fundamentally impacts wildfire activity, independent of fuel accumulation and climate change. We illustrate how attempting to suppress all wildfires necessarily means that fires will burn with more severe and less diverse ecological impacts, with burned area increasing at faster rates than expected from fuel accumulation or climate change. Over a human lifespan, the modeled impacts of the suppression bias exceed those from fuel accumulation or climate change alone, suggesting that suppression may exert a significant and underappreciated influence on patterns of fire globally. Managing wildfires to safely burn under low and moderate conditions is thus a critical tool to address the growing wildfire crisis.
Citation
Kreider, M.R., Higuera, P.E., Parks, S.A. et al. Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe and accentuates impacts of climate change and fuel accumulation. Nature Communication 15, 2412 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46702-0.