Climate Change is Extinguishing One of Our Greatest Weapons Against Wildfires
The American West is projected to lose one-fifth of the days available to safely light prescribed burns. Researchers turn to Indigenous groups to bring beneficial fires back.
By: Sarah Hopkins
In April 2022, the US Forest Service intentionally lit a fire in New Mexico’s woodlands. Like the many prescribed fires that came before, the goal was to burn only excess vegetation that increases the risk of wildfire. But land managers underestimated dry weather conditions and the blaze grew unmanageable. It became the largest wildfire in the state’s history, scorching a record 45,000 acres across three months.
The New Mexico blaze was top of mind for the authors of a recent study, published last October in Communications Earth & Environment. Examining global warming’s impact on prescribed fire conditions, researchers found that climate change is reducing the number of days when prescribed fires can be safely lit in the Western US and that it’s increasingly shifting favorable burn days — days that aren’t too hot, windy, or wet — to winter months.
As climate change erodes one of our most effective tools against large-scale wildfires, expanding opportunities for prescribed fires is crucial to mitigating the wildfire crisis, the authors contend. One recommendation is to remove regulatory barriers for Indigenous cultural burning: controlled fires that hold cultural and religious significance for many Indigenous groups in the US. It comes amidst growing recognition from Western scientists that cultural burns help preserve forest ecosystems, but a complex web of federal and state policies have prevented tribes from taking up the practice.
“There’s a broader realization from the fire ecology community that [Indigenous fire] has a really important role that had been mostly overlooked,” said Don Hankins, a Plains Miwok fire practitioner and a geographer at California State University, Chico, who has researched Indigenous fire practices for over two decades. Now, as wildfires are burning in conditions made hotter and dryer by climate change, “it’s coming to the forefront and is being seen as a solution.”
To better understand how climate change influences prescribed burns, the UCLA researchers analyzed climate data from 1981 to 2020 across 11 Western states. Looking at temperature, wind speed, and moisture level alongside vegetation dryness, they identified what lead author Daniel Swain calls “the Goldilocks window” — the ideal environmental time frames in which to ignite prescribed fires.
Feeding that data into a model estimating a global warming of 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2060 — an assumption widely held by climate scientists — the team found that, within the next several decades, warmer temperatures would reduce the number of Goldilocks days for prescribed fires by 17% across the Western US. The number of ideal days would shrink the most in the spring and summer months (when most prescribed burns are currently implemented), and winter months would see a 4% net increase in the number of favorable burn days.
The model also detected differences across regions. While it predicted pronounced decreases in burn days year-round in Central and Southern California and in much of Arizona and New Mexico, eastern areas of Washington and Oregon, and states further from the coast, may gain burn days.
Adapting to these climate shifts will require overhauling who has the power to put good fire on the ground, researchers say. But, that’s not so easy. California law prohibited Indigenous peoples from practicing cultural burns for over a century as part of a larger movement to violently remove Indigenous groups from their ancestral lands.
“For us, it’s about respecting fire and reestablishing fire as a natural process,” said Ryan Reed, an Indigenous fire practitioner from the Karuk, Hupa, and Yurok tribes in Northern California.
However, cultural burning is not permitted on most federal land, and in California, state policies still prevent tribes from taking up the practice. A recent Biden Administration report on wildfire mitigation called for reassessing federal regulations that that hinder cultural burning and Tribal fire programs nationwide, but it isn’t clear how long it will take to see real change.
Reed says that increasing cultural burns to mitigate the impacts of climate change will require scientists and policymakers alike to grapple with questions around re-incorporating fires into the Western landscape: “How do we live with fire again, and how do we combine Western science and Indigenous science together to be able to mutually benefit the communities in which fire is needed?”
