Increase in climate-driven wildfires calls for more investment in prevention

This article is published in association with United Nations.

The deadly wildfires that have swept through the Los Angeles area, destroying whole communities and causing billions in damage, reveal why countries must invest more in stopping these devastating blazes before they start. 

It’s much needed, as wildfires are rapidly increasing in intensity, frequency and duration due to the climate crisis and changes in land use, said Amy Duchelle of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). 

“Historically there has been very strong attention on suppression but much more intention and investment need to be on prevention,” she told UN News’s Dianne Penn this week. 

FAO’s Senior Forestry Officer and Team Leader on Forests and Climate explained how the UN agency is helping countries to boost integrated fire management and why everyone must play a part.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Amy Duchelle: Wildfires basically require three ingredients – a fuel source, hot dry weather, and an ignition source – and the situation in Los Angeles had all three of those to a severe degree, including strong winds which made those fires continue to burn out of control. 

Fire is not something that’s new to humanity. Fires have been used by humans for millennia and in fact are a traditional and important land and farming management tool for small holders and indigenous peoples, especially in developing countries. 

Fire has also been part of the Earth system for hundreds of millions of years and occurs in every terrestrial vegetation biome and on every continent, except for Antarctica. But we see that patterns are now changing in terms of the intensity, frequency and duration of extreme wildfires. 

UN News: Do we know how much of the world is affected by wildfires, and what are some of the implications? 

Amy Duchelle: An estimated 340 to 370 million hectares of the Earth’s land surface is affected by fire annually, and that includes approximately 67 million hectares of forested areas. 

Oftentimes the public’s attention on wildfires is a situation like we have currently in Los Angeles, where the images of the devastation are absolutely horrifying. I think, and many are saying, that we are in a new era in terms of climate change-fuelled wildfires, catastrophic wildfires, and so the approach to dealing with these wildfires needs to be different. 

Historically, there has been very strong attention on suppression but much more intention and investment need to be on prevention, so really dealing with the wildfire issue before the fires even began to burn. Many of these aspects have been put into place by many countries, but much more work is needed. 

Listen to the audio version of the interview here.

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UN News: You mentioned the role of climate change in wildfires.  The UN’s weather agency, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), just confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record. And, as you said, we’re in a new era. 

Amy Duchelle: The projections show substantial increases in the intensity, frequency and scale of wildfires in in the coming years and it’s of enormous concern, also because wildfires are not only fuelled by these warmer conditions but they also release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing further to the climate crisis, and then this actually becomes a vicious cycle that is tough to get out of. 

UN News: Tell us about FAO’s work on wildfires. 

Amy Duchelle: FAO has a long programme on promoting integrated fire management and we’re trying to do exactly what I was speaking to before: supporting countries in increasing their capacities for integrated fire management with a focus much more on prevention than on only suppression and response.  

We promote through what we call the five R’s. The first is a review and analysis of the fire situation in a given country or place. The second is risk reduction, and that’s really understanding how to reduce the risks of devastating wildfires. 

The third is readiness, so being prepared with protocols and procedures to deal with wildfires when they do happen. The fourth is response.  Wildfires will continue to burn, and there needs to be good firefighting, good response mechanisms, and teams in place. 

The fifth is recovery, not only of all of the infrastructure and devastation of urban areas, but also ecosystems. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), which we’re in now, is really a vehicle to also promote restoration post-fire. 

Unsplash/Fabian Jones

A firefighter battles a forest wildfire. (file)

UN News: You mentioned firefighting. Does this mean that countries must change their ways of firefighting, for example putting focus on tracts of homes and land rather than just single houses or locations?

Amy Duchelle: I think the Los Angeles fire has really highlighted the limits to suppression of fires when they’re burning in that way out of control. You can have the best firefighting system in the world, and California is renowned for its firefighting capacities, but even in a context like that, there are limits to suppression of wildfires. 

That’s very much why we need to be shifting focus towards prevention, risk reduction and readiness. Also, much of the investment has gone into response and then recovery, and that’s extremely expensive. The damages and losses of these catastrophic fires are in the billions of dollars, and more financial investment in prevention could potentially lower the costs of dealing with actual response and recovery. 

UN News: What can the general public do to support prevention, risk reduction and readiness?

Amy Duchelle: This is a whole-of-society kind of issue, and everyone indeed has a role to play. I think something else that we’re beginning to understand is that the concept of fire seasons is changing and that this is an issue to be addressed year-round, even when those fires are not burning. 

Most fires have an initial human cause to them, so really understanding whether it’s by accident or carelessness or the way infrastructure is set up, and really understanding that there are ways to promote integrated fire management behaviour through education awareness; kind of an “all hands on deck” approach.  This is not just obviously a forestry issue. This is across sectors and across all levels of society.