Red Lodge Clearinghouse

The analysis by the National Wildlife Federation says warmer, drier conditions are making forests more flammable, while state and federal fire policy has focused on suppressing fires, leaving large amounts of dead, dry trees in forests.

The environmental group is pushing for a new management approach that would include slashing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing fuel loads by thinning some trees and allowing some fires to burn, and limiting development near forested lands to decrease the risk that fires could damage human settlements.

Amanda Staudt, a National Wildlife Federation scientist, said this summer's severe wildfires in California -- which have scorched more than 1.3 million acres since mid-May -- are symptomatic of a larger trend toward more frequent and severe burns across the western United States.

The region's fire season now is about 78 days longer than it was between 1970 and 1986, and individual fires last about 30 days longer, the report says. That is in line with last year's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted that North America's annual window of high fire ignition risk could increase by 30 percent this century. Fires and insect outbreaks are likely to intensify as temperatures rise, the panel found, causing drier soils and longer growing seasons (Greenwire, Oct. 25, 2007).

One study projects that the overall area burned across 11 Western states will double over this century if average temperatures increase by 3 degrees Fahrenheit, Staudt noted.

An incendiary issue: the absence of snow

Steven Running, an ecology professor at the University of Montana, said a major factor in many Western wildfires is decreasing snowpack.

"Snow is obviously the best fire retardant ever invented, so as long as we have snow on the ground, we're in good shape," he said. "But as we lose spring snowpack, we're going into years with more and earlier wildfires that last longer and grow larger."

One study by University of California, Merced, researcher Anthony Westerling found that the majority of Western wildfires between 1970 and 2005 -- 56 percent -- occurred in years that saw early spring snowmelts. Just 11 percent of wildfires occurred in years with late snowmelts.

Those predictions come at a time when development near forest margins is increasing, causing fire managers to rethink the traditional "fire triangle" concept, one California disaster official said.

"The old fire triangle, having heat and fuel to burn and oxygen to support the process, has been replaced, not on a physical but an environmental level," said Don Feser, disaster preparedness coordinator for the city of San Bernardino, Calif. "Now we have the 'three Ws': wildland-urban interface, weather and wood."

Meanwhile, Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh said his agency's own research predicts climate will help drive an increase in the number and severity of fires and acres burned. The Forest Service believes careful management can help reduce some of those impacts, he added.

"Forest management, including harvest and prescribed fires, can mitigate the effect of those fires when they do occur, reducing fire severity and sustaining key ecosystem elements that would otherwise be lost," Walsh said.

Click here to read the NWF report.

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