“Thirstier” Atmosphere Will Increase Wildfire Risk out West

Will Climate Change Spark More Wildfire Damages?

How results will out

The Manchester base will be set up as a charitable company limited by guarantee, jointly owned by the funding partners; the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health. Under the scheme half a million middle-aged people will be picked at random and invited by their doctor to provide general information about their health. They will be asked to give a blood sample, ...

Risk Externalities, Wildfire Hazard, and Private Investment to Mitigate Wildfire Risk in the Wildland-Urban Interface

Homeowners in areas adjacent to wildlands – in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) – can mitigate the risk that their home will be damaged in a wildfire by creating “defensible space” on their property. This article explores homeowners’ incentives to invest in defensible space using a unique data set on 35 WUI communities in Nevada. This is the first study to analyze homeowners’ incentives to in...

Smoke Signals: Teasing Out Adverse Health Effects of Wildfire Emissions

Worldwide, the preponderance and severity of wildfires is increasing due to a number of factors, among them changes in temperature and precipitation patterns consistent with climate change. Aside from the acute threat of imminent death, wildfires expose people to a range of harmful pollutants in smoke. Although health effects are well documented for many of these individual pollutants— includin...

Warming and earlier spring increase western U.S. forest wildfire activity.

Western United States forest wildfire activity is widely thought to have increased in recent decades, yet neither the extent of recent changes nor the degree to which climate may be driving regional changes in wildfire has been systematically documented. Much of the public and scientific discussion of changes in western United States wildfire has focused instead on the effects of 19th- and 20th...