David Dodwell

Outside In | Humans must find a new relationship with fire to control global warming

Rather than end wildfires, humanity’s challenge is to restrain destructive fire and reduce the amount of combustion driving climate change

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A firefighter tries to extinguish a fire burning in the Koropi suburb near Athens on June 19. Scores of Greek firefighters and water-bombing aircraft were trying to contain a large wildfire on the fringes of Athens that forced authorities to issue evacuation orders for two nearby settlements. Photo: AP

David Dodwell

Published: 8:30pm, 21 Jun 2024

In recent months, we have watched wildfires blazing across northern California, Alberta and British Columbia in Canada and New Mexico as the northern hemisphere’s summer wildfire season has barely begun.

This is a reminder of an increasingly aggressive fire-climate feedback loop that is threatening communities across the world. It reminds us almost daily of the urgent need to restrain global warming, and the reality that we are at present failing.

Wildfires have generated an average of more than 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year during the last decade, with emissions from wildfires rising to almost 6.7 billion tonnes last year. Estimates suggest this means wildfires account for 20 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions, making them a troubling contributor to global warming which must be restrained.

Reactions to this news should be tempered with the knowledge that wildfires have been around for millions of years and have survived every ice age the planet threw at them. For most of that time, wildfires have been important contributors to climate stability, not just global warming.

What is different today is that so much of the wildfire we see is “bad fire” – the kind that kills people and destroys communities and landscapes. As we try to distinguish between good and bad types of fire, the troubling reality is that we are the key contributor. Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne, a historian whose research focuses on fire, wrote in Scientific American that humans “became unique fire creatures. We used fire to remake ourselves, and then we and fire remade Earth”.

From his point of view, our Anthropocene age could as easily and accurately be called the Pyrocene age. “We went to the top of the food web because we learned to cook landscapes for hunting, foraging, farming and herding. And we have become a geological force because we’ve begun to cook the planet. Becoming the keystone species for fire made us the keystone species for Earth.”