Wildfires Are Getting Worse, And More Costly, Every Year

The cost of fighting wildfires has risen in recent decades along with their severity and the damage they have inflicted, and 2018 appears to be no exception.

The U.S. Forest Service, the primary federal agency in charge of fighting wildfires, and other Department of the Interior agencies spent an all-time high last year of more than $2.9 billion combating fires – more than 12 times what was spent on suppression efforts in 1985, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center. The 2017 figure is still more than five times higher than the amount spent in 1985 when adjusted for inflation.

This year, with nearly 4.8 million acres already burned in the U.S. and wildfires raging in California, is shaping up to continue a trend that has seen the 10 worst fire seasons since 1960 in terms of acres burned occur since 2000.

In terms of the larger economic burden they pose, a Department of Commerce analysis from November – accounting for direct losses of structures and rebuilding but also indirect costs such as the hit to the tax base, tourism and deaths – pegged the total annualized cost of wildfires at anywhere from $71.1 billion to $347.8 billion.

Experts say several factors are to blame for the rising costs of combating wildfires. Changes in climate have resulted in fires burning on wider swaths of land, for more of the year and more severely. Longer summers, shorter winters and springs, soaring temperatures and persistent drought have contributed to hotter, drier conditions that have stretched the traditional American wildfire season far outside the boundaries of July to October.

Instead, fires occur year-round and in more places. A 2015 analysis led by Forest Service ecologist Matt Jolly found the global wildfire season length increased by almost 20 percent from 1972 to 2013, while the burnable area worldwide more than doubled over the same period.

"Wildfire is very much a natural part of the landscape. This is not something new," says Kimiko Barrett, a policy and research analyst at Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based nonprofit research group focuses on land management issues. "It's just the fact that our development patterns have increased the encounters of where humans are living now and where wildfires are occurring, in addition to changing climatic conditions and what exacerbates wildfire intensity and occurrence."

For each wildfire individually, the cost of containment and suppression is dependent on how close it is to settled areas. Examining Montana firefighting data in 2008, Headwaters concluded that a wildfire burning within a mile of homes will cost at least $1 million and that the number goes up $8,000 per home for each additional house in the vicinity of the burn area.

In recent decades, the number of homes in regions where settled areas abut uninhabited lands – called the "wildland-urban interface" – has increased dramatically, rising 41 percent from 30.8 million homes in 1990 to 43.4 million homes in 2010 and covering nearly 300,000 square miles, according to the Department of Agriculture. Homes in these areas are at higher risk for wildfires – and protecting them is a major driver of fire suppression costs.

"Given that fire plays an ecological role in 94 percent of wildlands across the conterminous United States, we know that wildfire can and will eventually occur in most U.S. wildlands," the Fire Service noted in a 2013 report. "Therefore, homes located anywhere in the WUI will eventually be exposed to wildfire, regardless of vegetation type or potential for large fires."

The risk to these homes – as many as a third of all housing units in the U.S. – are higher still because their presence increases the likelihood of human-caused fires, while trees and other vegetation threaded through sparsely populated areas can increase the risk of wildfire spreading between structures.

"It's more expensive to fight homes that are dispersed around the wildland-urban interface than it is to suppress a fire that's threatening a condensed community," Barrett says. "It's easier to protect one large unit in contrast to a dispersed arrangement of a dozen or more homes situated at more of a distance from each other within the wildland-urban interface"

Somewhat counter-intuitively, firefighters' efforts to suppress wildfires have actually made them worse.

A century ago, wildfires burned many millions more acres a year than they do now, and in 1910 the Forest Service adopted a policy of total wildfire suppression. In doing so, they were able to reduce burned area from a peak of more than 52 million acres in 1930 to first dropping below 10 million in 1953, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The number continued to decline, with the average area burned between 1960 and 2000 at 3.5 million acres a year.

Around the same time, ecologists came to realize that suppression was taking away an important natural process in which wildfires cleared fallen dead limbs and underbrush and stimulated new growth. The result was what fire scientists call "fuel loading" – a building up of flammable material that, when ignited, causes much more extreme, faster-spreading wildfires.

Barrett says that, despite evidence of the increased risk, public pressure to protect structures has meant the Forest Service has continued its more aggressive policy, putting out the vast majority of wildfires before they spread.

"It's just those few wildfires, anywhere from that 1 to 5 percentile range that escape initial attack that actually become a wildfire threat and eventual disaster if they get into homes and structures and burn into communities, as is what's happening in California," Barrett says. "So if they do escape that initial suppression, with all that fuel buildup in the forest, it exacerbates the intensity as well as their size."

"You have this dual problem of fuel loading through decades and decades of fire suppression, in addition climate change, in addition to people building in high-risk areas," she says. "It's a three-pronged sword that current federal management is trying to have to respond to."

The solution, experts say, is to plan for wildfires when building homes in at-risk areas – using ignition-resistant materials in new construction and retrofitting older structures, and creating a zone of protection around buildings by clearing vegetation – and reversing the policies that prevent wildfires from undergoing their natural processes.

"In the short term, we're able to save a home. But over years and decades of doing this, what we're realizing is we're just creating a larger issue and more severe situation in the future," Barrett says. "These wildfires are amplified by not allowing them to burn when they initially ignite."