Name: Why does climate change make wildfires worse?
Uploaded: 2021-06-12T11:49:16.000Z
Duration: 11 min 34 s
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Licking the coats of koalas, melting trees straight to ash.

Footage of the raging bushfires seems to be taken right out of a disaster movie.

Except this time there's no magical happy ending.

I sit and scroll through videos of the wreckage and feel fear and helplessness.

I can't help but ask how did we get to this point?

And what about the fires in the Congo Basin and Amazon Rainforest that seem to have been

pushed to the side as we zoom in on the consequences of an Australia on fire?

The devastation of Australian bushfires is extensive.

Evacuees have fled to wetter, safer grounds, as one professor estimates that more than

half a billion animals have already died in the raging infernos.

These bushfires, which at times reached 70 meters tall, have scorched every state in

Australia, but primarily continue to decimate two regions in the southeast: New South Wales

And since the beginning of the dry season in September, these fires burned an estimated

7.3 to 10 million hectares of land, reducing towns like Balmoral to ash.

As I write this, at least 28 people have died from the deadly inferno.

This apocalyptic destruction is the result of a perfect storm of conditions.

2019 was both Australia's hottest and driest year on record.

Combined with strong winds, the 2019-2020 bushfire season was primed to be a destructive

one, and indeed, the number of fires skyrocketed in November, and continue to be a problem

The record temperatures and lack of rain, are, as climate experts assert, a prime example

of how climate change exacerbates natural disasters.

And as these fires burn they push the world further towards the precipice by releasing

almost 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But Australia is not the only place experiencing an uptick in devastating wildfires.

They pepper Indonesia and scorch Siberia.

Today, though, we are going to focus on the ones that burned swaths of the Amazon rainforest,

as well as the flames that engulf Central Africa.

Months ago, the world was in an uproar about the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

The result of clearcutting and burning strategies enacted to open up space for cropland, and

And despite the lack of headlines these days, the Amazon continues to burn.

In 2019, human-caused and out-of-control fires burned 976,200 hectares of the Amazon rainforest.

That's the third-highest increase in the rate of deforestation in the Amazon's history,

at a 30% jump from the prior year, second only to 1995, which was 95% and 1998 which

The Amazon represents a hub of biodiversity and tackles the essential task of sequestering

millions of pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

Essentially it is the green lung of the earth, and as regulations loosened in Brazil, loggers

and intensive ranchers set fire to the edges of the rainforest to make way for industrial

The Amazon has experienced devastating deforestation before, but as the effects of destroying forest

by fire accumulate, the Amazon shrinks, and smaller amounts of deforestation have a greater

To top it all off, climate change once again makes these fires worse, as hotter temperatures

and drier landscapes make these tree-clearing burns much harder to maintain.

If you scroll across the world on the wildfire tracking app, Windy, it seems like all of

A region decidedly larger than the Amazon.

But there's a difference between Amazonian fires and those in the Congo Basin.

The fires in Central African countries like Angola are primarily seasonal and situated

They lick at the edges of the Congo Rainforest but have yet to encroach as much onto the

In part, this is due to the way grasslands react to fire, as well as how fires are used.

Farmers and Ranchers in Central Africa have implemented controlled burns on grasslands

They set fire to dried grasses before the wet season to use ash as fertilizer and purge

disease and pests from the lands, this is a much different process than in Brazil, where

fires are used indiscriminately as a tool to clear old-growth rainforest out of the

way for large, high-carbon animal agriculture businesses.

Indeed, the Central African savanna might not even exist without continuously controlled

After the fire season, savanna often grows back quickly and vibrantly.

So, many of these fires are seasonal, small, agricultural burns in the resilient savanna,

as opposed to the highly destructive Brazilian practices of setting fire to swaths of rainforest

that can take over 30 years to grow back.

But if left unchecked, unregulated fires reaching into the Congo Rainforest could mean a real

And as climate change heats the planet, and inevitably makes these regions drier, the

Congo Rainforest becomes much more susceptible to out-of-control fires.

Senior Forest Manager with Greenpeace Africa, Irène Wabiwa Betoko, told French public radio

service, RFI “[they're] very worried that the forests in the Congo Basin are more and

more exposed, more vulnerable to fire because these forests are threatened by an increase

Activists like Vanessa Nakate are taking action to raise consciousness, but it will require

large cultural and agricultural shifts across several Central African countries to prevent

the encroaching pace of deforestation of the Congo Rainforest

At the end of the day, it comes down to regulation.

Some of these fires are inevitable and natural.

Or tied to long-held agricultural traditions that are essential to healthy grasslands.

But the increased intensities of the infernos we are seeing recently are in part caused

by the dismantling of environmental regulations in favor of neoliberal free market policies

that allow large corporations to harm people and land with impunity.

So, let's travel back to Australia for a moment, and talk about Prime Minister Scott

In December, while the country was battling raging infernos, its leader was safely tucked

This speaks volumes to how Morrison has ignored the issue and consequences of climate change

in favor of more profitable and comfortable avenues.

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Why does climate change make wildfires worse?

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