With that in mind, no one's going to be happy to hear the world's largest assembly of fire ecologists is predicting much more to come.
In a declaration released this week, the Association of Fire Ecology said climate change will limit humans' ability to manage wildland fire.
The five-page San Diego Declaration on Climate Change and Fire Management will be submitted to delegates at the third International Fire Ecology and Management Congress in San Diego this November.
The congress expects to draw about 3,000 attendees from all parts of the world.
“All of the world's top fire ecologists are gathering in one place,” said Fire Congress chairwoman Melanie Miller, who works as a Bureau of Land Management fire ecologist in Missoula. “We expect this to be the largest gathering of fire professionals in history.”
While discussions will range over myriad topics, Miller said, the impact of climate change on wildland fire will be a major focus.
“My personal hope is the declaration will raise awareness among the populace that climate change is going to have an effect on everyone,” said Miller. “It's not only going to impact people living along the Eastern seaboard or in hurricane-prone areas. People will feel it here as well.”
In the western United States, researchers recently confirmed the fire season is getting longer, with large fires starting both earlier and later in the year.
“These changes are correlated with earlier spring snowmelt dates,” the declaration says. “The ecological impacts are wide-reaching because of the high severity of these fires burning through heavy fuel loads.
“With global temperatures projected to rise throughout this century, we expect increases in fire season length and fire size,” the declaration read.
A century of wildfire suppression in the western United States has provided ample fuel to feed the fires started during this warmer weather cycle.
Those accumulations of fuels, especially in drier vegetation types like ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, are helping drive wildland fires over greater distances, Miller said.
“It's a combination of the two,” Miller said. “It appears that climate change is having an affect, and then there's this overlapping issue of past management practices.”
Fire ecologists are seeing wildland fire conditions previously considered rare, the declaration says. Managers can no longer assume that tomorrow's climate will mimic that of the past several decades.
Miller said managers are going to have to make adjustments, which could include everything from budgeting to allowing some fires to burn in order to create breaks in large contiguous blocks of forest.
“We're going to see more fire, not less, and these increases in wildfire occurrence and severity are going to be part of our new reality,” said Robin Wills, the association's president. “We, as a society, must be prepared to cope with these changes.”
Land managers need to change their approach to managing wildland fire to adapt to this new reality, Wills said.
“Traditional approaches of suppression need to adapt to those changes in vegetation and resulting changes in fire regimes,” he said. “There is a direct relationship between changes in climate and changes in the way fires behave, and we need to make a corresponding change in our fire management.”
Read the declaration
To read the San Diego Declaration on Climate Change and Fire Management on the Internet, visit http://emmps.wsu.edu/firecongress and look for the declaration's link.
About the congress
The International Fire Ecology and Management Congress will consist of lectures, field trips, workshops, posters, and exhibits showcasing new products, technology, and tools on the leading edge of international fire science and fire policy. The Fire Congress' official Web site is http://emmps.wsu.edu/firecongress Registration is available at http://emmps.wsu.edu/firecongress/ register.html The public and reporters are welcome to attend all events, chairwoman Melanie Miller said.
Find out more
The Association for Fire Ecology is an organization of professionals dedicated to improving the knowledge and use of fire ecology in land management. Utilizing conferences, an online journal and selected publications, AFE continues to heighten awareness of the role of fire in contemporary ecosystems. For more information, go to http://www.fireecology.net
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