Managed retreat doesn’t always mean leaving. It’s about preserving the essential while redesigning communities to be better for everyone. Here’s what that can look like.
Colorado’s East Troublesome Fire jumped the Continental Divide on Oct. 22, 2020, and eventually became Colorado’s second-largest fire on record.
Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory
Scientists studied charcoal layers in the sediment of lake beds across the Rockies to track fires over time. They found increasing fire activity as the climate warmed.
Satellites can quickly detect and monitor wildfires from space, like this 2017 fire that encroached on Ventura, California.
NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens
Satellites can already spot a new fire within minutes, but the information they beam back to Earth isn’t getting to everyone who needs it or used as well as it could be.
Mark Poindexter puts a tarp on the damaged roof of his home in Gulf Breeze, Louisiana, on Aug. 29, 2020, in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Federal weather scientists are pushing to make the US more ‘weather-ready,’ which could mean prepping for fires, flooding or storms depending on where you live. The common factor: thinking ahead.
People with a plan feel more empowered and self-reliant during wildfire disasters. They have better mental and physical health outcomes than those who were less prepared.
(Shutterstock)
Wildfire smoke is both inevitable and largely unpredictable. We need to change our activities and behaviours to limit exposure to wildfire smoke and protect health.
Heat and dryness are leaving high mountain areas more vulnerable to forest fires.
David McNew/Getty Images
As the risk of fires rises in areas once considered too wet to burn, it creates hazards for mountain communities and for downstream water supplies.
Wildfire smoke rises near Prince Albert, Sask., in May 2021, where a fast-moving wildfire led local officials to declare a state of emergency.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kayle Neis
Recent wildfire seasons have been worsened by climate change. But wildfires also lead to additional climate warming when they release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Dry conditions across the West follow a hot, dry year of record-setting wildfires in 2020. Communities were left with scenes like this, from California’s Creek Fire.
Amir Aghakouchak/University of California Irvine
Drought conditions are so bad, fish hatcheries are trucking their salmon to the ocean and ranchers are worried about having enough water for their livestock.
Our research is deeply concerning because it signals there are no quick fixes to the ongoing fire crisis afflicting Australia, which is being driven by relentless climate change.
Fire in one part of a community can contaminate the water system used by other residents, as Santa Rosa, California, discovered after the Tubbs Fire.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Permanently protecting large, mature forests is a faster and cheaper way to stabilize Earth’s climate than complex carbon capture and storage schemes, and more effective than planting new trees.
What if we had a system, like Medicare, where costly fire prevention measures were subsidised?
In a year tied for the warmest on record globally, the U.S. was hit with costly hurricanes, wildfires, storms and drought.
AP Photo/Noah Berger and Gerald Herbert
NOAA released its list of climate and weather disasters that cost the nation more than $1 billion each. Like many climate and weather events this past year, it shattered the record.
Mural attributed to Banksy that appeared by Marble Arch, in London, during the Extinction Rebellion protests in April 2019.
(Andrew Davidson/Wikimedia)
Many storms, heatwaves, fires and droughts slipped under the radar this year.
The sequoias that live on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California are the largest trees in the world by volume.
Erin Donalson/EyeEm via Getty Images
Professor of Civil, Environmental & Ecological Engineering, Director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety, Purdue University
Wildfire Specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension; Adjunct Professor Bren School of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara