Imagine this: One day in late summer, the hazy skyline is making for an excellent sunset. The next day, you get an alert on your phone. “Evacuation Zone: Red,” it reads, “There is a wildfire headed your way. Evacuate immediately.” You only have fifteen minutes to pack a bag and flee. What are you taking? What are you leaving behind? Do you have enough room in your car for your family photo albums? Your favorite sweatshirt? Your cat? As you evacuate your home, you gaze back upon it and wonder if you’ll ever be back again.
For countless people living in areas susceptible to wildfire outbreaks, this situation isn’t imagined, but reality. From the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles to the Canadian Wildfires of 2023, news headlines are affirming the reality of increased wildfire risk within North America and the world at large. If you were to casually conclude that wildfires are increasing in severity, you wouldn’t be wrong. A new study out of the University of Maryland shows that wildfires now result in twice as much tree canopy loss per year compared to 20 years ago (Tyukavina, et al. 16). This is problematic because thick canopies conceal moisture within the thick vegetation below, curbing wildfire risk, and if tree canopy is lost at a higher rate, the risk of wildfires increases (Tyukavina, et al. 2). Of course, as the risk of wildfire increases, so does the risk of damage.
While the common impulse is to picture physical damage to wildlife, property, and infrastructure when thinking about the harms of wildfire, the adverse impacts extend much further. Wildfire smoke releases substantial amounts of the greenhouse gases, most notably Carbon Dioxide (CO2) into the environment, which consequently increases global temperature and future wildfire risk due to increasingly dry conditions in forests. To put thisit in perspective, the Canadian Wildfires of 2023 put 2.4 Gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, comparable to the yearly emissions produced by a large industrialized nation (Younger 1). This massive release of CO2 leads to a positive feedback loop: wildfire emissions are made worse by global warming, the earth warms up due to increased emissions, and the cycle continues until disruption.
While it’s tempting to chalk these trends up solely to climate change, the ecological reality is far more nuanced, and there may be solutions to the massive destruction caused by these fires that don’t involve world-scale action to reverse global warming.
Forest fire management policies are typically implemented for three reasons: prevention, mitigation, and wildfire management, all in an attempt to protect property, maintain healthy ecosystems, and safeguard public infrastructure (Bisht, et al. 3). One controversial method to reduce the negative effects of wildfire burns is to implement controlled burns, which are man-made and managed fires much smaller and more strategically placed than those produced by a wildfire, so as to be managed and able to be contained in event of an emergency (Bisht, et al. 4). Though this may seem counterintuitive to the goal of reducing wildfire pollution, controlled burns have proven to reduce the risk of danger to infrastructure, people, and property, and reduce the massive carbon footprint of unpredictable and damaging wildfires (Bisht, et al. 4). This works by targeting high-risk fire zones, such as those with excessively dry or dead vegetation, to burn under control by the forest service. Once burned, these areas are no longer susceptible to wildfire outbreaks, as any fuel for the fire has been diminished (Bisht, et al. 4). There is further evidence of the benefits of controlled burning in the history of some Indigenous American tribes, who strategically burned forests in order to clear land for nut and fruit crops, to herd insects, and to improve habitat outcomes by clearing brush susceptible to fire outbreaks (Panuk and Kipfmueller 1). This means that controlled burns may serve a dual purpose: to reduce wildfire risk, and to increase agricultural productivity.
Hopefully next time you look into the hazy sunset, it won’t be wildfire smoke you’re smelling. You won’t have to worry about emergency alerts and evacuation plans. Rather, you can sleep in peace knowing that the fire burning miles away will stay in place, protecting you from unpredictable wildfires one controlled burn at a time.
Works Cited
Bisht, Sarita, and Hukum Singh. "Advancing Forest Fire Management Practices: Policies and Strategies." Forest Fire and Climate Change: Insights into Science. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025. 279-293.
Panek, D. and Kipfmueller, K. 2021. Apostle Islands 50th Anniversary Resource Stewardship Symposium. Day 1. April 1, 2021. https://friendsoftheapostleislands.org/2021/04/01/past-present-and-future-of-fire-in-the-apostle-islands/
Tyukavina, Alexandra, et al. "Global trends of forest loss due to fire from 2001 to 2019." Frontiers in Remote Sensing 3 (2022): 825190.
Younger, Sally. “New NASA Study Tallies Carbon Emissions From Massive Canadian Fires.” NASA, August 28, 2024. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-emissions-from-massive-canadian-fires/