Managing the growing cost of wildfire - KEY TAKEAWAYS - The American West is experiencing unprecedented wildfire

The rapid increase in The health costs of wildfire smoke are wildfire activity has led to a naturally expected increase massive — and growing in wildfire smoke, both in the regions where the fires occur as well as thousands of miles away (e.g., the U. [...] be for health, we study the 2020 wildfires in August and September across the West Coast, which blanketed most This increase in smoke threatens to undermine decades of the region’s 50 million residents with dense smoke of air quality improvements across the country — for weeks. [...] S., the number of acres emphasize that these numbers are estimates of the likely on which prescribed burns occur is a tiny fraction of the number of lives lost, based on the best data we have at number of acres on which wildfires occur (see Figure 3). [...] focuses on social and economic In addition, there is the question of where to find the impacts of environmental change, and on the resources to engage in fuels management at a scale large economics of rural development in Africa. [...] scholar at the Stanford Woods So we must reduce the impacts on climate that are also Institute for the Environment and an important underlying driver of intensifying wildfires in director of the Climate and Energy California and the West.