L- The wildfires that engulfed Los Angeles earlier this year looked like something you'd expect to see in a Hollywood disaster movie. But new data shows they're becoming an increasing reality across the world and the UK has now had its first mega fire. So what exactly is all that burning doing to the planet?
[Transcripts here for readers writers and researchers]
It kind of builds and builds and builds because you're putting more carbon into the atmosphere and you're removing the trees which are taking the carbon out of the atmosphere.
I'm Lucy Watson and this is what you need to know. Martin Stew is our science correspondent. Martin, what's causing the rise in these wildfires then?
M: Well, it's worth saying for starters, you know, wildfires do happen naturally. They have done for centuries and centuries. What we're talking about here is a sort of an unnatural rise. And it won't surprise you to know that we, yes, humans have a large part to play. So half of it is to do with the land use. So loss of biodiversity, taking down trees, moving things around.
The other half is the impact of climate change itself. We get more extreme heat. We get more extreme drought. That makes plants, shrubs, trees more liable to burn. And you know, scientists are saying that the biggest wildfire events are probably two or three times more likely as a direct result of global warming. And some specific fires, like for example, that LA one that you were talking about, actually were even more susceptible as a result of the changing climate. So they think that the area that burnt in LA was 25 times greater than it would have been had we not had some form of, you know, man-made climate change.
L: Okay. So I remember last summer even there was a big blaze in the North York Moors. I can also remember actually going myself to a huge forest fire that damaged property and cars and homes in Wellington in East London. And then there was also in Dorset and Wiltshire last last summer too. So where are they increasing? Are there specific areas countries?
M: So I mean globally all over the place it was a 9% increase in the amount of emissions from wildfires over the last year. last year actually the worst place was was the Americas. So we know about the LA fire actually that was kind of big on impact. It looked very dramatic on TV in terms of scale was pretty small compared to other things. So Canada, Bolivia, and Brazil were the three really big ones because they've got huge areas of forest. So when that starts burning, it's very hard to fight those fires. You can't really fight it. You're just trying to contain.
And so those are huge areas. And between the three of those, those are releasing the most CO2 into the atmosphere. But other places that really never get reported on, Africa for example, in one week, 22 million hectares burned in one week. And if you look at that, it includes 2 and a half % of the Democratic Republic of Congo and 6% of Angola, which is about a third of the size of the UK. So enormous areas that don't even really get talked about at all.
L: Why aren't we hearing about it, do you think?
M: I mean, it's it's a mixture of things. Sometimes it's the places where the biggest fires burn are the more remote places. Okay. Because it's dense forest, it's it's in the wilds of Canada, it's in Bolivia, it's in the Amazon jungle, these sorts of things. So, it's hard to get access to them. And also because wildfires do happen, it's hard to kind of pinpoint and say this one thing is particularly bad.
Do you I I remember just anecdotally there was real sort of moral panic about the Amazon burning, wasn't it? About five, six years ago when we saw these amazing pictures. What we've seen this year was as dramatic as that. It just didn't the pictures weren't going viral around the world. Depends on the busy news day or not whether it makes it sadly. Yeah.
L: So, when I knew that we were going to have a chat about it, I thought, I wonder how bad actually statistically, and everyone loves some figures and stats, don't they? How many kind of fires do we have in or have we had? And I looked it up and in England and Wales alone, we tackled 856 wildfires up to mid August, which is six times more than in 2024.
M: Yeah. I mean just on that sort of six times 2024 be slightly careful because if you remember the summer of
L: my my sources have failed me Martin.
M: No your numbers are good. Your numbers are good but remember the summer of 2024 there were massive wildfires in southern Europe because they- And then we had a really damp, soggy, dull summer. So actually that was a bit of an outlier. However, when you look back at say 2023, 2022, 2021, we've still had sort of twice the number of call outs this year than we did back then.
So if you look across the UK, actually the last year was the worst on record. Um the larger area burnt than actually burnt in Greece. And you obviously normally associate Greece because it's hotter with with more wildfires. And if you look at the actual area, it's 47,735 hectares, which is about twice the size of Liverpool, but more importantly, it's nearly twice the previous record. And
L: I'm liking your stats better than mine. They're more well fought through, I think.
M: Occasionally. And and then we've got that mega fire you talked about which sounds yeah impressive doesn't it sort of headline stuff. Mega fire.
What makes something a mega fire by the way?
M: Well it's a kind of categorization of the size. So once it goes beyond 10,000 hectares which is about 15,000 football pitchers if that's easier to sort of
that's better. I understand that much more. Yeah.
M: So it's a mega fire and and this particular fire which is in carbridge and and Daram Moore up in sort of Kang Gorns up in Scotland that fire was more than 10,000 hectares five times bigger than the Saddleworth Moore fire if you remember that in Manchester about seven years ago. So really really big thing and that's the kind of biggest wildfire on record. Um and why?
Well, the large part is whereas in America the kind of main fire season tends to be in August as you get to the end of the summer, everything's really hot and really dry, in the UK actually it's often relatively early in the spring when you've still got some dead stuff in the winter.
L: See, I would have gone for August, too. Yeah.
M: No, I would have too, but it's cuz you've got the the dead plants and stuff around from the winter still. And we had a really dry debris almost. Well, it's kindling, isn't it? [overlapping] It's basically it's it's ready to be ready to burn. So we had the driest spring on record this year and that meant for a longer period you weren't getting that kind of luscious green growth. You were having more dry stuff around and that's why the risk of these fires was far greater. Add into that then the heat waves longer prolonged spells of dry weather and and it becomes very difficult.
L: So climate change is bringing these longer drier summers to us. I mean I guess our new normal. Yeah. Um although it doesn't feel that new anymore. Um because we've been we've had a fair few of them now. But wildfires are actually making climate change worse, aren't they?
M: Yeah, they can. It It's a vicious cycle really. At one side, you've got the fact that we remember, you know, our biology lessons from primary school. We need the trees because they absorb the carbon. So, if they're burning, we lose that carbon absorption.
But the bigger end is the other side. When you burn those trees and you burn the forests, you're releasing carbon into the atmosphere. So Well, you think about think about a log fire at home. When you burn that, it's carbon. A log is a bit of carbon. So you burn it, it goes under the atmosphere. Again, this happens naturally, but normally it's balanced out by the ecosystem of then more trees growing. And sometimes you need a bit of fire to trigger growth and clear all those sorts of things.
But if you look at the carbon emissions from wildfires, last year equated to the emissions from the 200 lowest emitting countries combined. So it's like it's a massive massive thing. It's a it's often a natural process, but it's also a huge impact on the climate. And so, as we start to see more of these fires, it kind of builds and builds and builds because you're putting more carbon into the atmosphere and you're removing the trees which are taking the carbon out of the atmosphere. So, it's a slippery slope really.
L: Oh, this is turning into very difficult. There's also been a significant report this this week on climate action.
M: Yeah, that's right. So, there's two things; if you're thinking about what you want to do about our changing climates. So, there's two options. You either what's called mitigate or you have adaptation. Mitigation means let's try and stop thing the change getting worse, i.e. let's put less carbon into the atmosphere, let's burn fewer fossil fuels, all those sorts of things. And that's why you have these climate conferences like COP, which is coming up quite shortly.
The issue with mitigation at the moment is that the world is kind of falling behind and with leaders like Trump coming in who are pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, you're losing momentum and initiative and so we're struggling on the mitigation front. The other side is to say, right, well, even if we stop putting fossil fuels into the atmosphere now, things are still going to get warmer because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for for centuries. So, you need to adapt. You need to be able to cope with the changing climate.
And so you need to put money and resources into preparing people and infrastructure and wildlife to be able to cope with what's happening. And if we go back to April, the climate change committee, which is a sort of an arms-length section of the government who advise our government on what needs to happen with climate change, they said at the moment our adaptation, how well prepared we are, was basically not appropriate. it wasn't up to scratch and we were falling further and further behind and even since the new government came in there had been no discernable change in being able to adapt.
So the Labour government then said to them, "Right, can you give us some advice? Tell what are we looking at?" Because, you know, these are long-term things. You got to have something to plan for. And on Wednesday, they came back and they said, "Right, you need to plan by 2050 for two degrees of warming." And that sort of got some headlines because, you know, the target is to try and keep global warming to 1.5 degrees.
So I I asked the woman from the climate change, is that it is 1.5 dead in the water? She said, "No, we're still aiming for that, but every fraction of degree that you go over that, then things get more difficult and the cost of adapting goes up." And so really, when you're looking to plan, you need to have a kind of a conservative with a small C plan in place. So that's why you're aiming for two degrees. And then I sort of asked, well, you what does two degrees of warming look like if you're trying to adapt for the future? And it looks like, you know, twice as many heat waves, drought conditions for potentially twice as long, which means doubling the risk of more wildfires again. Um, plus on the flip side, because we're talking about hot and dry there. When you then get rain, it tends to fall in more intense bursts, which then you get flooding, particularly flash flooding in rural areas, which is the other real issue, and that little bit of sea level rise. So all these things you got to think about and you've also got to think because you're planning not just for 25 years time for 2050 but you're planning for however long it may be if you're building some huge project.
They said you should have contingencies to be able to upscale all that kind of adaptation for four degrees of warming. It's like when you build a motorway bridge you build it wider than the motorway so if you need to stick an extra lane on you don't have to knock all the bridges down. You know it's kind of just have a bit of grownup forethought for what the worst case scenario could be.
L: My husband always says to me, "Worry about problems that you can fix." Yeah. Climate change is not one little old me can fix, but I can do my bit, maybe. Yeah. What can someone like me do to to assist in some way? What do you do at home that's that's good?
M: Well, I'm I'm No, I'm I'm I'm I'm terrible. I'm here telling people what's going on, but you I don't do enough. You I try and eat less meat on certain days. I'll try and take the bike roll in the car on certain days, but I'd still fly off and go off on holiday. You know, I'm I'm not holding myself up as a bastion of somebody who is green at all. There's lots more that I could be doing.
I had a really interesting conversation the other day with a guy. He was a neuroscientist. He was talking about sort of behavioral change and how you enact it around climate change. And his question to me was, if you want to sort of encourage people to make cleaner, greener choices, do you do you scare them or do you offer hope? And I said, "I don't really know what the best option is because you do because we do tend to scare."
But his point was if you scare people, some people will be galvanized into action. You know, fantastic, start more recycling. They'll, you know, go down to a one car family, whatever it might be. Other people will say, "oh, it's too big. I can't cope. I'm just switching off. I can't make any difference." And also, when you look globally, you think, "Oh, the UK is 1% of emissions." China's doing more. America's doing more. I just forget it.
And then another portion will say they'll rally against and say they're lying to us. It's it's not true. Which we see, don't we? There's this realization. Yeah. So if you go down the kind of fear line too much, then that's the other option. If you go down the hope line, I think fantastic. We'll inspire you by saying you can make a difference, Lucy. Well, people might get confused. You mean I can't? Well, no, you can.
But what what he was saying, which is really interesting, and we need to maybe reflect this more in our reporting. Well, I certainly do is actually by taking small actions as individuals, you then feel empowered to make more of a difference. So even if it's, you know, organizing or doing a local litter pick, you then start meeting other people who have a similar mindset and then you think, oh, actually, I quite like that and I'll do this thing. And by seeing and being involved in positive action, it encourages more action. So actually kind of fear hitting someone with a stick or hope with a carrot don't really work.
L: Mind you, we not none of us respond very well to being shouted at, do we? No. Is that kind of like
M: No, they don't. And it's difficult, but it's very hard not to scare people when the figures and stats and stuff that keep coming out from science are quite scary. so I think any small differences, any diff things you can do, make a change. But the other thing is, and here's a classic thing of human nature. If you ask people what is the biggest thing you can do to help the environment, they normally say recycling. Because we can all wash out a tin of baked beans and put it in the recycling bin and we feel quite good about ourselves cuz it's Oh, do you wash yours? Well, some Oh, God. No. Sometimes. Oh, dear. I'm failing at every point. No. No. But no wonder I've got foxes. No. Well, exactly.
But but he was saying that actually those that's nowhere near the biggest thing. If you really want to make a difference, it's the hard things. Have one fewer child. Don't fly on holiday. Get rid of your family car. But those things aren't comfortable. You know that they're the really difficult things. I'm not saying that everybody needs to do those things, but it's finding a balance through and and a lot of it needs to be, you know, kind of government driven and and and incentivized. I'm not saying kind of cracking down with the hardship, but making greener choices easier than non-green choices because we all know money talks, doesn't it? Yeah. You need life to be easy. People are struggling. So, you need to make the greener choices easier. Meanwhile, the government need to do the big things, the big ticket things like building flood defenses, helping with restoration of nature, all those things that we know about, but they don't come cheap either.
L: I shall stick to washing out my tins of beans then.
M: Good. Why not?
L: Martin, great to talk to you always. And for our reporting on all things climate and science, head to it.com/news and follow us on YouTube. Until our next quick briefing, thank you for joining us.
***
ITV News has been providing trusted and impartial news for more than 60 years. On our YouTube channel you'll find the best of our journalism from the UK and around the world.
[KE: Everything climate scientists predicted about global warming since the 1970s is coming true, only faster]
No comments:
Post a Comment