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In the midst of an unprecedented heatwave in the United States, President Joe Biden will meet on Wednesday with Western heads of state, cabinet members and federal emergency management officials to warn experts of the worst drought hundred seasons yet.
The president has pledged to raise the salary of firefighters by $ 13 an hour, calling it a “ridiculously low salary.”
Experts are looking to see if Biden is able to prepare the U.S. for another year of dangerous fires and extreme temperatures while addressing long-term forest and climate balance.
But they have warned that in the short term, the risk is already cooked up.
“As for this year, we don’t have much we can do except to ensure what firefighters need and FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and Forest Service and BLM [Bureau of Land Management] they are coordinating as closely as possible with state governments, ”said Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program.
“Despite the government’s efforts to control the risk, it will take a few years for the problem to move forward,” said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Environmental Institute.
Why are fires on the rise?
Fires are already burning in Arizona, California and other states, and water reservoirs are at historic lows.
He has lived in the western United States for a long decade megadrought scientists say they have been unseen for 1,000 years. Climate change is accelerating drought by changing the water cycle and causing more evaporation over already low rainfall.
Experts explain that this year’s fire season is longer and more intense, with experts explaining that because of decades of poor planning, forests have been left dense due to plants that are now dry and ready to burn.
A firefighting helicopter shows a waterfall in Los Alamitos, California, on June 14 [File: Mike Blake/Reuters]
Empty field scorched earth The fires have increased dramatically since the 1970s, the Reuters news agency reported, and the U.S. now has “megafuias” that burn more than 100,000 acres (40,000 acres). In 2020, fires burned a record 10 million acres in the western United States.
Humans are the most common causes of fires, and population growth in the west is creating more dangerous fires along with the construction of residential areas affected by fires. All of this has resulted in asthma caused by heartburn and heavy smoke as a result of increasingly deadly fires and health problems.
What should Biden do?
Experts make it clear that: US forests they are too dense and need to be proactively thinned using mechanical cleaning and prescribed burns. To do that, the U.S. Forest Service needs more money.
Last year, the Forest Service had a drastic cut in its budget to reduce hazardous fuels, Wara explained. Prior to the pandemic, it spent more than $ 300 billion a year, but by 2021 it had shrunk to less than $ 100 million. Its funding increased by 2022 but is still below pre-pandemic levels.
“We need to think differently about this issue, and the Forest Service doesn’t think differently in its 2022 budget,” Wara said. “It’s the same thing.”
The Forest Service wants to make a two- to four-fold reduction in hazardous fuels compared to current levels, Wara said, but the truth is it needs to do 10 times more.
State and federal governments can avoid huge economic losses in the future by investing now, Field said. He used California as an example: in 2019, California suffered the fires could result in economic losses of more than $ 30 billion, but it could spend between $ 5 billion and $ 10 billion a year over the next five years to keep the fires under control. However, California still spends little; The fire budget for 2022 is $ 1 billion.
“The investment required to achieve a safe and stable track would generally be less than a year’s losses from a bad fire,” Field said.
Fire smoke hangs in the Uinta Mountains of eastern Utah on June 21, 2021[File: Jim Urquhart/Reuters]
Experts believe that we need to return to the strategy that Native Americans used before they were forcibly removed from their land. The idea is to reintroduce “good fire”. Hundreds of years ago, less intense fires roared and roared through forests regularly, and indigenous peoples used planned burns to keep ecosystems in balance. When the settlers took over the land, the policies were inconsistent and harmful.
John Bailey, a professor at Forestry College at Oregon State University, was a firefighter in the 1980s. Firefighters then thought they were doing good by removing the fires, but their efforts allowed the forests to become dangerously dense and the farmland turned into forest, paving the way for fires in larger areas of land.
In the 1990s, endangered owl habitat protection policies reduced forest harvesting and management significantly in the West, but Bailey said we really need “good fire” to renovate that habitat. “She is OK destructive force and a creative force to sustain old growth, and that’s the path we want to follow if we want to conserve them, ”Bailey said.
Although there have been fewer fires in the U.S. than in recent decades, statistically, if a home fire occurs, the occupant is more likely to die today than they were 40 years ago. Read the new NFPA and #FPRF For more ‘Fire in the US’ report: https://t.co/G7zgqLJDC3 #research #fire #home fire pic.twitter.com/8nvSzKg2aV
– NFPA (@NFPA) June 29, 2021
“A fire, a good fire, a low-intensity shallow fire, a forest floor should be a fire every decade or probably every 20 years for the longest time,” Wara said. “And that means we have to treat something like 10% of the total landscape every year. We’re not close to that – we’ve dropped about a percent. That didn’t matter so much, because climate change didn’t overload the high season, but now, of course, yes “.
Wara added that the Biden administration should finance more pre-disaster risk reduction as a result of fires Through FEMA.
A new forest worker
Wara said Forest Service staff are underpaid and many are seasonal. “To really get that job done, they really need a new staff.”
The operation of the current system is that during the season, people work to clean up hazardous fuels and work as firefighters during the fire season. As firefights are longer and more intense today, they start firefighting earlier and when the firefight is over, they need time to heal mentally and physically, and see their families. This means that not so much hazardous fuel cleaning occurs.
“It’s not a sustainable model,” Wara said.
Bailey proposed hiring a federal forest management employee, a public works support program from the 1930s and 1940s similar to the Civil Conservation Corps.
Wara said there is a “tremendous opportunity” to participate Native Americans in a new model and staff, because many areas require border reserves. He said political leaders should decide to give land to Native Americans for management.
“If we are to conserve more land, we need to think differently, given the racial injustice and genocide that led to the federal and private ownership models of the land we now have,” he said.
“The fire problem is something we can control, but we need to be proactive and ambitious,” Field said.
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