UPSC CSE Mains Syllabus: GS-3- Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment.
Wild Fire and Climate Change
In an updated review of scientific articles that try to establish a link between climate change and fire risk published since January 2020, scientists note that human-induced climate change promotes the conditions on which wildfires depend, enhancing their likelihood and challenging suppression efforts.
What is the update:
- The update focuses on the ongoing wildfires in the western US and the bushfires that ravaged southeastern Australia in 2019-2020.
- It notes that climate change increases the frequency and severity of fire weather around the world.
- Further that land management alone “cannot explain recent increases in wildfire because increased fire weather from climate change amplifies fire risk where fuels remain available”.
Factors affecting fire:
- The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was published in 2013, identified a few factors that could influence the way wildfires play out.
- These include global increase in average temperatures, global increases in the frequency, intensity and extent of heatwaves (breaching of historically extreme temperature thresholds) and regional increases in the frequency, duration and intensity of droughts.
- While wildfires are typical in both California and parts of Australia in the summer months, the intensity and scale of wildfires that these areas have seen in recent years has raised some concerns among scientists about the linkages between human-induced climate change and fire risk.
Findings from the analysis:
- Scientists are wary of attributing any single contemporary event to climate change.
- This is mainly because of the difficulty in completely ruling out the possibility of the event having been caused by some other reason, or a result of natural variability.
- However, the authors note that natural variability is superimposed on the increasingly warm and dry conditions that have resulted from climate change, which has led to more extreme fires and more extreme fire seasons.
- Further, they note that there is an “unequivocal and pervasive role of climate change in increasing the intensity and length in which fire weather occurs”.
- While land management is also likely to contribute to the wildfires, it does not alone account for the recent increases in the extent and severity of the wildfires in the western US and in southeast Australia.
Australian fires:
- While bushfires are routine in Australia in the summer months, the scale and intensity of the fires last year was unprecedented.
- The fires killed thousands of animals and impacted more than 10 million hectares of forest land, which is an area the size of South Korea.
- Scientists suggested at the time that there was strong evidence to suggest that the bushfires, which were especially fierce last year, could be linked to climate change.
Source:”Indian Express”.
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