Merc admits Bay Area benefits from controlled burns
Image by Wikimedia Commons
Local common-sense environmentalists have been saying this for years (especially since 2020's out-of-control wildfires): good forest management involves prescribed, monitored burns. These burns, as the Mercury News just acknowledged, prevent forests from being overpacked, thereby limiting wildfires' potential to spread and pollute the air. Below, Harvard's Applied Science school explains why controlled burns are helpful, especially in Northern CA.
Wildfire smoke is a threat to air quality, public health, and ecosystems throughout the U.S. Notwithstanding the impact of this year’s Canadian wildfires, the West typically sees much higher exposure to wildfire smoke than other regions of the country. New research from Harvard University, the U.S. Forest Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that controlled burns – particularly in coastal areas of northern California and the Pacific Northwest – could dramatically reduce the overall amount of wildfire smoke exposure in vulnerable rural communities and dense population centers across the West. The findings are published online in Earth’s Future.
“Since the early 1900s, a legacy of fire suppression in the West in combination with a warming climate have contributed to severe wildfires. Until now, there hasn’t been much research into how land management methods might influence smoke exposure,” says Makoto Kelp, the paper’s lead author, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard as a member of the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.
“Smoke consists of a mix of gases and tiny particles. The particles are bad to breathe because they can get deep into your lungs and trigger a slew of acute and chronic diseases,” says modeling group co-leader Loretta Mickley, senior author of the paper and a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Drier and warmer conditions, together with accumulated underbrush, have made the West more vulnerable to large, severe wildfires. Implementing smaller, prescribed fires could make it more difficult for out-of-control wildfires to spread. These controlled fires still emit smoke, but the net benefit is less smoke pollution overall.”
Analyzing wildfire data from 2018 and 2020 and using a computer model to simulate how prescribed fires would behave, the team found that controlled burns in key zones in northern California, western Oregon, and eastern Washington could have an outsized effect on reducing wildfire smoke exposure throughout the entire western U.S. This is due in part to prevailing winds carrying smoke across the continent and to the abundant, dense vegetation that fuels smokey fires.
Satellite observations and government records reveal that only a handful of such prescribed fires were set for land management purposes in the West between 2015 and 2020. Using fire to clear agricultural lands and manage habitats is a more common practice in the East and Southeast U.S. While Indigenous communities in the West have historically set controlled fires, land managers over the last century have tried to quickly suppress wildland fires for fear of their destructive spread, thus contributing to a “fire deficit.”
This article originally appeared in Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Read the whole thing here.
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