TED Countdown’s Post

Name: TED Countdown on LinkedIn: #tedtalk #wildfiresolutions #sustainability #tedcountdown
Uploaded: 2024-07-24T19:30:02.393Z
Channel: TED Countdown
Description: Can we put an end — or at least lessen the damage — caused by extreme and regularly occurring wildfires? Watch forest ecologist Paul Hessburg's full #TEDTalk here: https://bit.ly/4c00NZP #wildfiresolutions #sustainability #TEDCountdown

TED Countdown

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Can we put an end — or at least lessen the damage — caused by extreme and regularly occurring wildfires? Watch forest ecologist Paul Hessburg's full #TEDTalk here: https://bit.ly/4c00NZP #wildfiresolutions #sustainability #TEDCountdown

Transcript

In recent years, a lot of western forests have burned in large and destructive wildfires, and the science is pretty clear. If we don't change a few of our fire management habits, we're going to lose many more of our beloved forests. So why is this happening? Well, the forest that we see today look nothing like the forests of 100 or 150 years ago. The historical forest landscape was this constantly evolving patchwork of open and closed canopy forests of all ages. And there was so much evidence of fire. And it's important to understand that this landscape was open with meadows and open canopy forest. There was crosstalk between the patterns and the processes. You can see that in dry forests, trees were open and grown and fairly far apart. Fires were frequent here and when they occurred they weren't that severe. While further U the mountain in the moist and the cold forests, trees were more densely grown and fires were less frequent, but when they occurred they were quite a bit more severe. These different forest types, the environments they grew in, and fire severity, they all work together to shape this historical patchwork. It provided a natural mechanism to resist the spread of future fires across the landscape. Let's add humans to the mix. After World War 2, timber harvesting got going in the West and the logging removed the large and the old trees, and these were survivors of centuries of wildfires. And the forest filled in thin barked fire sensitive small trees filled in the gaps and our forests became dense with trees so layered and close together that they were touching each other. So when you compare what forest looked like 100 years ago. And today, the change is actually remarkable. Notice how the patchwork has filled in, and after a century without fire, dead branches and downed trees on the forest floor, they're at powder keg levels. What's more, our summers are getting hotter, and they're getting drier and they're getting windier. And the fire season is now 40 today, 80 days longer each year. Because of this, climatologists are predicting that the area burned since 2000 will double or triple in the next 3 decades. So what do we do? We need to restore the power of the patchwork. We need to put the right kind of fire back into the system again. It's how we can resize the severity of many of our future fires. And the silver lining is that we have tools and we have know how to do this.

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