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Study: Climate change could fan wildfires

The Columbian
Published: September 17, 2014, 5:00pm

TUCSON, Ariz. — As wildfires burned in California, a study by several major environmental groups estimated that climate change could mean that future blazes will be much larger and add billions of dollars to already costly losses.

The 46-page study released this week, titled “Flammable Planet: Wildfires and the Social Cost of Carbon,” is part of an ongoing project by three groups to examine what it calls the missing risks, such as wildfires, that climate change can make more expensive. The groups are the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

U.S. wildfires cost as much as $125 billion annually, but climate change could add as much as $60 billion to the bill by 2050, the study said. The projected cost increase is attributed to an expanding area in which wildfires burn, with such growth estimated to reach 50 to 100 percent by 2050. California “could experience a 36 to 74 percent increase in area burned by 2085 under a high emissions path,” the study says.

“Climate change is here now, and its toll on our health and economy is rising every day,” said Laurie Johnson, chief economist at NRDC.

“The current scientific consensus is that wildfire risk will increase in many regions of the world as climate change leads to warmer temperatures, more frequent droughts, and changing precipitation patterns,” the report, published Tuesday, said. “Fires are expected to become more frequent and intense, and fire seasons are projected to last longer.”

However, fire officials in several Western states said climate change wasn’t solely to blame for the size and cost of fires. Other factors must be considered, they said, such as hundreds of years of overly aggressive fire suppression, leading to overcrowded forests that will continue to spark more intense wildfires.

“That problem only grew as we went from periods of abundant rainfall, to average rainfall and then to drought,” said Dan Ware, fire prevention and outreach program manager for New Mexico State Forestry.

Jim Paxon, who retired from the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico in 2003, serving as a spokesman for major wild land fires for 13 years, blamed lack of forest management for an explosion of unwieldy and costly wildfires in the West.

Lack of prescribed burns and less timber cutting are major factors, said Paxon, who now serves as special assistant to the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

“I could spend hours showing some daylight on what it has cost us taxpayers since the demise of the timber industry at the hands of enviro-litigants,” he said. “Now we have mega-fires as a partial consequence.”

According to federal statistics released Tuesday, firefighters were battling 15 uncontained large fires, eight of which were in California. Between 7 million to 9 million acres are burned each year in the United States, while globally the damage is 865 million acres.

How to measure the full cost of a wildfire is complicated and becomes difficult depending on what is included in calculations. The cost includes direct market damages such as lost timber and property, non-market damages such as health effects, and added expenditures such as fire prevention, according to the report.

“Research suggests that the total costs of a wildfire are typically 10 to 50 times its suppression costs,” according to the report. “Given that the United States spends roughly $2.0 (billion) to $2.5 billion on wildfire suppression per year, we estimate that the total cost of U.S. wildfires is presently between $20 billion and $125 billion annually.”

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