They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won't Anybody Listen?

Prescribed burning or controlled burning is an ancestral indigenous practice in which specific sections of a forest are burned. Controlled burning also happens naturally like when lightning strikes a forest. Controlled burning is good for a forest, it gets rid of dead areas, leads to healthier soil by clearing the ground, and minimizes the strength of large fires. However, due to U.S. laws that criminalized controlled burns the practice was discouraged in the U.S. Now, due to climate change and larger fires, prescribed burning is making a come back.

As governments and businesses make pledges to cut their carbon emissions, planting tress has become a popular solution to combat the effects of climate change. But tree-planting schemes take time and proper management to actually be effective. Many efforts have failed to take some key factors into consideration, including types of trees, location, and even community-involvement.

Led by Portugal and Spain, European nations have shifted their responses to wildfires from a heavy emphasis on suppression to a more prevention-based approach. Climate change has increased fire risk greatly. By letting smaller fires burn, to reduce the fuel available to future megafires, and with other forest-management methods, Mediterranean countries have had no large blazes so far in 2020. Portugal, three years after a massive fire killed at least 120, registered its lowest number of fires in a decade. In Spain, prevention includes Fire Flocks, herds of sheep and goats whose grazing cleans up forests.

A blue carbon credit scheme in Kenya is not only restoring mangrove forests, but it’s also reducing environmental crimes and providing a way for residents to make money. The Mikoko Pamoja carbon project is a partnership that encourages the protection of mangroves in exchange for selling carbon credits. Since the project launched 2013, each year it traps the equivalent carbon emissions of about 650 cars. While it’s not a perfect system, it has inspired other blue carbon programs in other villages.

Satellite-based forest monitoring, paired with other sophisticated measures of a forest's health, is transforming the speed, precision, and economics of finding and eradicating infestations and pinpointing acreage where preventing wildfires and deforestation will prove most effective. Rather than rely on ground-based, manual surveys of vast tracts, forest managers are refining their ability to observe more useful data from space. As success stories pile up, however, the science still must rely on the political will to enact needed policies for a healthier climate and forests.

A collective of timber companies, conservationists, and forestry professionals has made the adjacent national forest more resilient to wildfires by focusing on small-diameter trees while preserving old growth. In 2019, the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition allowed for the harvesting of 87.1 million board-feet from the forest and 16,561 acres underwent controlled burns and mechanical thinning to mitigate the risk of wildfires. The group’s record of compromise and innovation could offer a blueprint for other areas looking to boost the resilience of fire-prone forests and rural economies.

An Indonesian government program called Masyarakat Peduli Api, or “Fire Care Community,” aims to improve community responses to wildfires and restore peatlands — valuable ecosystems that store carbon. Through community engagement and education, this volunteer fire brigade patrols the peatlands and addresses small fires before they spread. The program remains underfunded, but residents recognize the importance of their work.

Coordination and planning can prove to be the best defensive measures against wildfires. Funded by the US Forest Service, the Community Planning Assistance for Wild Program (CPAW) promotes community fire adaptation, including measures like prescribed burns. Policymakers and city planners enrolled in CPAW benefit from teaming up with foresters, economists, and other experts to model risk and mitigate the impact of fires.

A new timber mill in Costilla County could majorly improve the forest health of the greater region by thinning undergrowth to reduce risk of wildfires, curbing the spread of invasive insects, and decreasing the demand for water in the face of drought. The mill could also create jobs and further economic development for the area.

The most destructive wildfire in New Mexico’s modern history started as a prescribed burn managed by the United States Forest Service. These fires are meticulously planned and executed to remove flora that increases the risk of extreme wildfires, and the vast majority of them go as planned. The Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak Fire did not, leaving officials and locals to assess what went wrong and rebuild the impacted communities.