As the Amazon continues to burn and news of more wildfires in Indonesia and the Arctic Circle emerges, Sophie Parsons takes a look back over the past year with hopes of better understanding how the climate crisis has directly impacted the increasing wildfires.
updated: 13.12.2019
In the past week, social media has been flooded with devastating images of blackened trees and raging fires; our newspapers headlined with news of catastrophe and calls for political action. As the fires continue to engulf the planet’s largest rainforest, spreading across the border from Brazil to Bolivia to destroy nearly a million hectares of the Bolivian Amazon, understanding the phenomenon of the wildfires sweeping across the globe is becoming increasingly more important.
In less than 12 months since California saw some of the ‘deadliest’ forest fires the state has ever experienced, reports of wildfires from all corners of the globe have been linked to the climate crisis and increasing temperatures. In the past two decades, 72,400 wildfires have resulted in an average of 7 million acres of U.S land being destroyed. According to the Global Forest Watch, there have been 24,178,545 fire alerts across the entire planet in the past year alone (27 Aug 2018 – 26 Aug 2019). However, with only around 15% of these fires resulting from natural causes, the links between the climate and these fires can seem dubious.
Perhaps, it is the combination of both the human and the natural to consider here, how our actions can directly and indirectly affect the natural cycles of the earth. Though the fires can result from careless behaviour of discarded barbecues and cigarettes, or from large scale deforestation for industry, the speed at which they spread is perhaps quickened by consequences of the climate crisis. Record temperatures have left the earth dry; an increasing vapour pressure deficit has led to less humidity in the air and an increased intensity to the sun’s light. As a result of this changing climate, drier conditions appear to be making the land more vulnerable to fires.