Humans are certainly beginning to see the end of the Covid tunnel, but they are still far from being at the end of their troubles. The UN has warned that the world is not prepared for the exceptional fires which are expected to increase by the end of the century due to global warming. The mega-fires that have occurred in Australia or California and as far as the Arctic, ravaging forests and homes in their path, were in fact only the beginning, warns the report by UN-Environment and the GRID-Arendal center published on Wednesday .
Fires, natural, accidental or provoked, are not directly caused by global warming, but the increasingly frequent and intense episodes of droughts and heat waves create conditions particularly favorable to their development. “Even with the most ambitious efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet will experience a dramatic increase in the frequency of conditions conducive to extreme fires,” the report said.
Exponential increase in catastrophic fires
Even if the world manages to limit warming to +2°C compared to the pre-industrial era, the main objective of the Paris agreement, the number of episodes of catastrophic fires like those which ravaged Australia during the austral summer 2019-2020 or the Arctic in 2020, is expected to increase between 9 and 14% by 2030, between 20 and 33% by 2050, and between 31 and 52% by 2100.
These figures relate only to the most exceptional fires, which in theory only occur once every 100 years and which would thus occur a little more often. “These are low-probability events and this increases their probability slightly,” explains one of the authors, Andrew Sullivan, of the Australian agency CSIRO. However, “less extreme episodes are likely to increase just as much,” he added.
Reduce risk by better managing fuels
Fires currently represent a danger for living beings: smoke inhalation, soil degradation and water pollution, destruction of the habitats of many species. Not to mention the worsening of global warming due to the destruction of forests, crucial for absorbing the carbon we emit.
If the risk of fires cannot be eliminated, it can be reduced, insists the report. In particular by improving the management of “fuels” (ie everything that can burn), determining the behavior of a fire with weather conditions (heat and drought which increase with warming) and topography.
Misused money
However, “the response of governments to the fires is to put money in the wrong place”, regrets the boss of the UN-Environment Inger Andersen in a press release. According to the report, the costs of damage caused by fires are significantly higher than the investments to fight them, the largest part of which today concerns the reaction to fires that have already started (firefighters, evacuations).
An imbalance that must be corrected by investing in prevention: reducing activities that can cause fires to start, better managing dead plants left on the ground, clearing brush around homes, modifying land use planning, etc.