This

year's fire season in California has already broken records in terms of the number of acres that have been burnt.

Katrine Bragg is our environment editor.

I think everybody will have seen pictures now of midday in San Francisco looking like a 10 p.m. landscape because the skies ahead are completely darkened by the smoke. And of course, it's not just California that's burning. We've got fires now burning in Oregon and in Washington state as well.

And it seems like these fires, these fire seasons get worse and worse each year. And it's tempting, of course, to blame climate change for at least part of that.

There's two things going on. On the one hand, globally, we are seeing more intense fire regimes. You're seeing drier landscapes, more dry vegetation to burn, longer fire seasons, and all of that leading to a fire regime that's on turbo drive. And this is true in many regions around the world, from the Arctic to Brazil to California, the Mediterranean, and Australia, for instance. On top of that climate factor, in some places, you have complicated demographics. So people pushing out into what in the US they increasingly call the wildland urban interface, where you have these sort of houses dotted through, say, a wooded landscape. So in the Western US, you have this double whammy of urbanization of rural areas, climate change, which means that we are not only experiencing a more intense fire season, but they are causing greater human damage as well. And in the Western US, on top of that, there have been some historical policies that have made the ecosystem more vulnerable as well. What

policies are those? So

there's a history of wildfire suppression in California, stopping the smaller blazes from removing the flammable undergrowth. And as a result, you get this sort of fuel loading. What that means is that basically you can try and keep the fires down for a certain amount of time. But eventually, because this is an ecosystem that burns naturally, a fire will take hold. And as a result of these decades of fuel loading, it's just catastrophic when that happens. So places like California are never going to be able to eliminate fires. Effectively, if people want to live in these regions, they need to learn to coexist with fire. Well,

what does that entail? As you say, once they happen, they get swiftly out of control.

Just about every fire expert I've spoken to says that it is possible to live with fire. Everything from how you build a house, the materials that you use, the vegetation that you put around it, the way out to the community level and how you plan a neighborhood all of that can be designed to either allow the fire to sweep through and cause as little damage as possible to the actual structures or actually just move around the community and the result of this is you can theoretically build communities that are known as shelter in place. So when a fire is headed towards that community, people head indoors and stay in their homes for the 10, 20, 30 minutes that the flaming front takes to move through.

But if an ecosystem like this, these fires are unavoidable, why hasn't the western U.S. basically followed those plans so far? On

the one hand, this sort of understanding of fire is relatively new. California actually, remarkably, is the only state in the U.S. to have a statewide fire building code for the wildland-urban But the problem is that those building codes came in in 2008. A lot of the science has progressed since then. The building codes haven't evolved with the science. The hazard maps that define which parts of California, which neighborhoods need to adhere to those building codes are not up to date and don't correspond to the actual risk that fire poses to some communities. And then there's a huge problem of retrofitting. The building codes only apply to structures that were built in 2008 or more recently. And there's no incentives, really, for people to retrofit their houses, which can be expensive.

I mean, you speak of California and the Western US as an almost unique ecosystem, yet we've talked on the show several times about fires kind of around the globe. I mean, what are the dynamics there as regards, for example, the influence of climate change versus bad management of the land and so on? Every

region is different. There are analogs, of course, and I think the closest one to California is Australia. Other places, the situation is different. So the drivers in Brazil are quite complex. You have a huge problem of deforestation that is drying out the landscape and creating fuel for fires. But on top of that, again, you have climate change, which is raising temperatures, also drying out the landscape, also lengthening the season during which fires take hold, and therefore also contributing to this sort of greater, more intense fire regime. the situation is very different. The Arctic is burning now in ways that we really have never seen before. The only significant human influence that you have really in the Arctic on these fires is climate change. You can't blame the Arctic fires on deforestation. So

in particular, the fires that are attributable largely or even in some cases almost entirely to climate change, what can be done? The

way climate change influences global temperatures is actually quite slow. So even if we were to completely eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, which is obviously not going to happen, you would still see temperatures rise for many years. And that's just because of the complex physics of how the heat moves through the physical system and ends up in the atmosphere. So yes, we absolutely need to cut emissions. That is a long-term strategy for the long-term sake of humanity, but it is not a short-term solution to the very real impacts that we are seeing on the ground now. For that, we need to accept that the planet is changing around us and that humanity needs to change with the planet. And when it comes to fires, that means we need to learn to coexist with fires. So in places that are densely inhabited, we need to apply all these lessons that the fire experts are providing us with. And in places that aren't, say, Siberia, you can't just let Siberia burn. You can't just let the Arctic burn, because there's a much greater risk in Siberia, which is the release of large amounts of methane. And so people need to come up with ways of quenching those fires. So addressing this situation is on a global level for the long term, we need to mitigate climate change. And then for each specific region, we're going to need some specifically adapted solutions.

Katrine, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.