Government agencies and corporate media consistently emphasize the expansion of wildfire acreage caused by a warming climate. Studies that examine only two or three decades of North American fire history support these claims. “Considering these studies, forest managers and the general public may be surprised to learn that a significant fire deficit persists in many forested ecosystems,” according to a peer-reviewed study conducted by a team of scientists led by Sean Parks with the Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana.
For scientists, this recent increase in area burned raises questions about contemporary wildfire impacts (since 1984) versus historical fire regimes (pre-1880). Using a multi-century record encompassing more than 1,800 fire-scar sites across diverse forest types, Parks and his fellow scientists discovered “a substantial, persistent fire deficit from 1984-2022 in many forest and woodland ecosystems, despite recent increases in burning.”
Published in Nature Communications, the Parks study finds, “Contemporary fire occurrence is still far below historical (1600-1880) levels, in spite of multiple ‘record-breaking’ recent fire years…. Individual years with particularly widespread fire during the 1984-2022 period were not unprecedented in comparison with the active fire regimes of the historical period across most of the study region.”
The evidence indicates that, even under a warming climate, the burn rate in recent decades “has been much lower than historical rates across most of the continent. We attribute this disparity to aggressive fire suppression, disruption of traditional burning, and forest loss and fragmentation from land development and other land uses.”
The results of the Parks team’s research show that, despite increases in areas burned in recent decades, “recent years with exceptionally high areas burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective…. Although contemporary fire extent is not unprecedented across many North American forests, there is abundant evidence that unprecedented contemporary fire severity is driving forest loss in many ecosystems and adversely impacting human lives, infrastructure, and water supplies.”
