Megafire And New AI/ML Models For Change

A lot of us got personal experience with smoke and wildfire over the past year.

Even people out of the way of these massive fires saw the evidence, hundreds of miles away.

The problem is one that lots of people understand intuitively – in changing the habitats and the landscape of the continent, we started to suppress natural fire cycles and that created the conditions for a different kind of conflagration.

Allison Wolff CEO of Vibrant Planet talked about this at the Planetary Stewardship event, defining ‘megafire’ as a fire that burns more than 100,000 acres and has significant impacts on ecosystems and communities, and explaining why this is so important to understand if we’re going to seriously address this aspect of climate change. We have to keep fire adapted ecosystems, which are now burning severely, intact. Fire adapted ecosystems represent 53% of land on Earth and we are running out of time.

California, she said, is getting these megafires every year.

“It is literally in our face right now,” she said. “We can do something about it, but we have to move very fast.”

Wolff detailed some of the sobering statistics:

• That California’s 2020 wildfire emissions matched the carbon emissions of 24 million cars running nonstop for a year; Canada’s 2023 wildfire emissions tripled the the country’s footprint this year.

• That 93% of natural forests in America were cut down as European Americans moved west and built mines, railroads, and towns

• That 80% of terrestrial biodiversity is in forests

Those are sobering numbers. What can we do?

Wolff talked about a solution, using machine learning and AI models to map forests and fine scale to support scenario planning to mitigate risk to communities and ecosystems, and monitor what works.

“We already have the most powerful carbon sequestration machines on earth,” she said, talking about: forests, and describing how beneficial fire can help with bad fire.

“Not all fire is bad fire,” she said, noting that healthy fires help with carbon cycling and species regeneration. The Native Americans knew that! But we need more of it in current forest administration.

With that in mind, Wolff showed how parties are using satellite imagery with ML algorithms to map the forest and keep these maps current for natural resource managers and community protectors.

She talked about the combination of ecological thinning and prescribed fire operations to keep forests healthier.

She also went over other solutions like reintroducing beavers to help restore habitats…

“The system will get smarter and smarter over time,” she said of the potential for AI to help. But as she also noted, it won’t happen without thousands of young people choosing natural resource management as their career path. Land use planning is also a big part of the solution. We can change how we build, we can change where we build, to safely live with fire in landscapes that need fire.

This was one of those testimonies that really makes you think as you listen to people sharing their expertise in climate science. Let’s pay attention and get these kinds of programs rolling at scale to keep the world healthier for future generations!