Enlarge image
A forest fire in Mato Grosso, Brazil, one of the largest wildfires ever observed there (August 2020)
Photo: Gustavo Basso / NurPhoto / Getty Images
The rainforest has repeatedly been in flames in recent years, with huge clouds of smoke shrouding the Amazon.
The fires broke sad records in both 2019 and 2020.
What recently caused a worldwide sensation could soon become normal.
A new report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) warns that the number of extreme forest and landscape fires could increase drastically.
The number of extreme wildfires is likely to increase by 50 percent by the end of the century, according to forecasts.
Wildfires and climate change reinforce each other.
Even with optimistic assumptions, the increase would still be 31 percent.
In a medium scenario, the increase could be 30 percent by 2050, and 14 percent by 2030.
The report comes ahead of the United Nations Environment Assembly, which begins on February 28.
The conference will take place this year as a hybrid event in Nairobi.
Representatives of the 193 member states meet, among other things, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unep.
The planet is burning, ever harder, longer, hotter – and often in surprising places.
Extreme fires are not only huge fires, but also wildfires in regions that have rarely been hit by them so far.
Above all, the Arctic is one of them, but also the Amazon region and the Pantanal region bordering to the south, a paradise of biodiversity.
The triggers include not only droughts, but also human factors such as deforestation or new settlement areas.
The damage is immense.
The flames were already costing the Brazilian Amazon region around 100 million US dollars a year in the late 1990s, which corresponded to around nine percent of the gross national product there.
Almost three thousand people die there every year as a result of the toxic clouds of smoke.
Large fires are also becoming more frequent in the far north.
In the summer of 2020, gigantic areas in Siberia burned, triggered by a heat wave.
The fires "would have been almost impossible" without climate change, according to the report's authors.
Without anthropogenic influences, such fires would occur »once in 80,000 years«.
The surprising thing is that these regions in northern Russia are now receiving more precipitation on average over the year.
But within a year, the precipitation varies more, there are very wet and very dry phases, and in the latter the risk of fire increases.
The money to fight it is being invested in the wrong way
Often, however, ruthless land use is the main trigger of the fire infernos.
This applies in the Amazon as well as in Indonesia.
The risk of fires increased there due to slash-and-burn agriculture, monocultures and the draining of peat areas.
In 2015, huge areas burned, entire landscapes were shrouded in smoke, half a million people suffered from acute respiratory diseases, and the damage amounted to more than 16 billion US dollars.
It caught fire again in 2019, with more than $5 billion in damage.
Much of this is known and almost predictable.
And yet, according to the report, politics and administration often still cling to the old methods of dealing with wildfires: if there is a fire, they fight the flames with airplanes, fire engines and troops of firefighters, rather than investing the money in advance in preventing fires to invest.
The report calls for a "radical rethinking of government spending on wildfires, shifting investments from response to prevention and preparedness." Often about half of wildfire money is spent on fighting the much more important, long-term Planning to prevent fires in the countryside, on the other hand, only accounts for 0.2 percent of the funds.
The authors advise reducing the money that goes into extinguishing today and instead investing about a third in prevention.
Currently, the amount of damage caused by wildfires is around ten times greater than the expenses for its enclosure.
"After fires, we have to repair the damage, but also better protect against future damage," says Peter Moore, forest fire expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and one of the 52 authors of the overview study.
He calls this approach »Building Back Better«.
"The UNEP report is very elaborate, it summarizes the state of the art well," says fire ecologist Johann Georg Goldammer, who does not appear as an author in the study.
However, Goldammer, the founder of the Global Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC) in Freiburg, also warns against overinterpreting climate models: »We have to be careful when making projections from climate models.
I'll just remind you that 20 years ago a study calculated that the risk of fire would decrease in the far north.
Instead, today we are seeing an increase in widespread wildfires in the Arctic Circle.
In recent years, however, the climate and fire models have improved.
But it is at least as important as such forecasts to anchor current knowledge in local and regional initiatives in order to close the gap in practice.«
Taming fire with fire
Goldammer also sees a weakness in the report precisely in this gap in practice: »The UNEP report fails to mention the large number of regional initiatives and networks that have long been actively working in many countries to implement the core requirements of the report.
Many countries have long stopped looking at wildfires purely from the perspective of firefighters, but see fire more holistically as a cross-sectional task for firefighters, civil society, local government, forest management and so on.«
Stephen Pyne, a professor emeritus of fire ecology at Arizona State University and author of several standard works on forest and bush fires, takes a similar view.
He praises the report though.
But he notes: “I find it amazing that this is the first report on fire in Unep's fifty-year history.
That shows how limited our knowledge of fire is."
Pyne would have liked a more differentiated view of fire: "The report does point out that fire can also have advantages, but this argument could be a little more central," he replies when asked.
Pyne repeatedly points out how helpful controlled burning at the right time of year ("prescribed burning") can be, for example to reduce undergrowth and thus deprive hotter and more destructive fires of fuel.
So taming fire with fire.
What if the report's insights and recommendations are not heeded?
"I'm afraid we'll be sitting here again in five or ten years," says Peter Moore of the FAO: "And presenting the next report, which will be very similar to this one.
And quite frustrated.«