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Understanding and responding to the health and climate emergency
Published in Stephen Battersby, Clay's Handbook of Environmental Health, 2023
Emma L. Gillingham, Helen L. Macintyre, Raquel Duarte-Davidson, Revati Phalkey
Wildfires are unplanned fire burning in natural areas, such as a forests or grasslands which can be caused by natural phenomenon (e.g. lightning) or human activity. Four elements are necessary for a wildfire to start: Large biomass of fuel, usually leaves, bark litter, dead wood and living foliageFuel dryness, where fire risk increases in areas where multi-year droughts have occurred and there is dried-out vegetationIgnition, which can be anthropogenic or naturalFire weather, where hot, dry, windy conditions enable fires to spread rapidly through an area Temperature increases, specifically intense heatwaves, plus precipitation decreases and population growth at the wildland-urban interface has increased human exposure to fires.
Modeling with WFDS Combustion Dynamics of Ornamental Vegetation Structures at WUI: Focus on the Burning of a Hedge at Laboratory Scale
Published in Combustion Science and Technology, 2023
Karina Meerpoel-Pietri, Virginie Tihay-Felicelli, Anthony Graziani, Paul-Antoine Santoni, Frédéric Morandini, Yolanda Perez-Ramirez, Frédéric Bosseur, Toussaint Barboni, Xareni Sánchez-Monroy, William Mell
Research on fires spreading at Wildland-Urban Interfaces (WUI) has significantly advanced as a result of the scientific community willing to prevent the fatalities and communities’ destruction occurring year after year in several countries around the world as Australia, Greece, Portugal, Spain and the United States, among others. However, research into WUI fires, and how to potentially mitigate the loss of structures in such fires, is far behind the fire safety science research within buildings which has developed over the past fifty years (Manzello et al. (2013). This is mainly due to the complexity of the mechanisms involved in the spreading of fires at WUI which depends on several factors such as topography, weather, vegetation, and structures (i.e., dwellings, garden sheds …), as well as, on the interactions between all of them.
On Unraveling Community Ignition Processes: Joint Influences of Firebrand Showers and Radiant Heat Applied to Fuel Beds
Published in Combustion Science and Technology, 2023
Sayaka Suzuki, Samuel L. Manzello
Throughout the world, devastating large outdoor fires have been responsible for the destruction of vast amounts of infrastructure and the loss of human life. Across many continents, wildland fires that spread into urban areas, known as wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires, are capable of enormous destruction (Manzello et al. 2018). In the year 2018, WUI fires in the state of California destroyed more than 18,000 structures and caused scores of fatalities (Syphard and Keeley 2019). Yet only a year earlier, another series of WUI fires, also in Northern California, caused sheer chaos and destruction. WUI fires continue to occur throughout the Americas, Australia, Europe, and in Asia. Significant WUI fires were observed on Chile in 2014, on South Korea in 2019 and on Australia in 2019 and 2020 (Davey and Sarre 2020; Reszka and Fuentes 2015). It is important to distinguish WUI fires from wildland fires; WUI fires include the combustion of both vegetative and human-made fuels and occur where population centers exist whereas wildland fires include the combustion of vegetative fuels and occur in uninhabited areas (Johnston, Blanchi, Jappiot 2019).
Wildfire probability models calibrated using past human and lightning ignition patterns can inform mitigation of post-fire hydrologic hazards
Published in Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk, 2022
Miguel L. Villarreal, Laura M. Norman, Erika H. Yao, Caroline R. Conrad
Human activities are the primary source of wildfire ignitions globally (Costafreda-Aumedes et al. 2017), and human ignitions are increasing in the western United States where wildfires are increasing in frequency, size and severity (Williams et al. 2010; Dennison et al. 2014; Balch et al. 2017; Nagy et al. 2018). Models of wildfire under future climatic conditions predict dramatic increases in ignitions and area burned (Hawbaker and Zhu 2012) and consequently, greater societal exposure to extreme fire events in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) (Bowman et al. 2017). Human modification of fire regimes through past management (i.e. fire suppression) or more recent global changes (i.e. climate change, development in the WUI, and increasing human ignitions) have led to increased fire risk and impacts to communities (Nagy et al. 2018). Natural resource planning and fire management will benefit from frameworks that identify specific linkages and feedbacks between human actions, ecosystem processes, and wildfire hazards (Moritz et al. 2014).