A Climate Change Adaptation Expert on How To Reduce Fire Risk
With the recent Los Angeles fires causing devastating destruction, a 2023 Columbia Climate School and Headwaters Economics report on wildfire mitigation strategies provides valuable insight into fire risk reduction.
Wildfires have always occurred naturally and play an important role in forest health, according to the report. Fires burn off dead vegetation, release nutrients in organic matter, stimulate growth in some seeds, and kill pests. Today, however, because so many people have settled near forested land, fire suppression—rather than fire management through prescribed burns or the reduction of flammable material—has become the main way the U.S Forest Service deals with fire risk.
The Columbia Climate School spoke with Lisa Dale, co-author of the report and director of the M.A. in Climate and Society program at the Climate School, about the best strategies to reduce fire risk and the difficulty of implementing them. Her research focuses on wildfire risk zones across the American West.
Was L.A. prepared for these fires?
No. The L.A. fires started as a wildfire, and very quickly became an urban fire and a structure fire. In a lot of wildfire situations, the most common source of home loss and damage is not from wildfire; it’s from burning embers from your neighbor’s house. These embers become fuel, and a house goes quickly from being a victim of the fire to an instigator of the fire. This new era, where the rise in the number of people living in the wildland urban interface, combined with increased risk of fire due to, among other things, climate change, has created conditions where wildfires very quickly become structure fires and urban fires. We’re going to need to draw on expertise from both urban disaster management and forest disaster management when we rethink how to manage these types of hazards.
What is the most effective fire preparedness strategy?
All the research tells us that home hardening is the best fire-preparedness strategy. Home hardening means doing work to properties to make them less flammable, including things like managing building materials, planning landscapes around the homes, properly situating your wood pile, choosing the right siding for your house and determining how close the homes are to each other. California is the national leader in mandatory building codes, and California Building Code Chapter 7A is the most robust example of a building code in the US—it establishes minimum standards for building construction in areas at risk of wildfire, including requiring fire-resistant materials and construction and vegetation management.
So to your question, were they prepared? In some ways, they’re the most prepared because they have the most aggressive building code statewide for new construction. The problem is that 80 to 90% of the properties are exempt from that building code because the law, which was passed in 2008, only applies to new construction; it does not include retrofitting structures that existed before 2008. The scale of trying to harden every structure that exists in the state of California, including with retrofits, is just impossible to imagine.
Photo credit: AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
