Areas once considered safe from major fires won’t be immune, including the Arctic, which the U.N. report said was “very likely to experience a significant increase in burning.”
Tropical forests in Indonesia and the southern Amazon of South America also are likely to see increased wildfires, the report concluded.
The report describes a worsening cycle: Climate change brings more drought and higher temperatures that make it easy for fires to start and spread, and in turn those blazes release more climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere as they burn through forests and peatland. But U.N. researchers said many nations continue to spend too much time and money fighting fires and not enough trying to prevent them. Land use changes can make the fires worse, such as logging that leaves behind debris that can easily burn and forests that are intentionally ignited to clear land for farming, the report said.
“It impacts people’s jobs and the economic situation that people are in,” Humphrey said. “It’s integral that fire be in the same category of disaster management as floods and droughts. It’s absolutely essential.”In the United States, officials recently unveiled a $50 billion effort to reduce fire risks over the next decade by more aggressively thinning forests around “hot spots” where.
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