By David Calkin, Kimiko Barrett, Jack Cohen, Mark Finney, Stephen Pyne, and Stephen Quarles for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.

Consider several of the most devastating fire disasters of the last century. In August 2023, the wildfire-initiated urban conflagration of Lahaina, Hawaii, damaged or destroyed more than 2,200 structures and killed 98 people. In December 2021, the Marshall Fire sparked conflagrations in Superior and Louisville, Colorado, destroying 1,084 structures and killing two. In September 2020, the Almeda Drive Fire in the communities of Talent and Phoenix, Oregon, destroyed 2,600 homes and killed three. In November 2018, the Camp Fire initiated ignitions in Paradise, California, destroyed 18,804 buildings, and killed 85. In November 2016, fires spread through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, destroying 2,460 structures and killing 14.

These fire disasters burned in vastly different environments. But all had human causes (power lines contributed to at least three), were near communities, occurred during extreme wind events, then inflicted their damage as urban conflagrations. Almost all destruction occurred within the first 12 hours after ignition. These fires immediately overwhelmed wildland and structural firefighting efforts, which were largely ineffective during the initial and extreme phase of the fire. Further, all these fires occurred since 2016. It's clear that structures and whole communities were vulnerable to ignition and burning-irrespective of what initiated the fires.

Society largely regards the wildfire problem as the destruction of human communities. Collectively, disaster fires, such as those mentioned here, have been lumped into a category of wildland-urban interface fires. These problem fires were defined as an issue of wildfires that involved houses. In reality, they are urban fires initiated by wildfires. That's an important distinction-and one that has big repercussions for how we prepare for future fires. To date, these repercussions have not received enough attention.

The Right Framing

Community fire destruction has become a national crisis, a systemic problem that will only worsen without aggressive, appropriate intervention-and this intervention will have to look far different than the current dominant paradigm. Climate change is blurring the boundaries that had defined where, when, and how fires burn (1). The needed changes will challenge ideas, institutions, and policies. The first step: reframing, from a focus on the wildlands to one centered on the structure and its immediate surroundings.

To effectively address this urban conflagration crisis requires that we fundamentally redefine the WU fire problem. Calkin et al. (2) developed a community wildfire risk framework that starts with a focus at the individual home level and identifies realistic objectives, effective mitigations, and responsible parties to reduce WU fire risk. The framework highlights the critical role of individual homeowners and local government, while recognizing that the traditional federal and state land-management agencies with responsibilities for wildland fuels management and suppression response have limited impact on community destruction. However, many of the recent investments to address wildfire risk to communities, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, are primarily directed toward fuel treatments in natural areas governed by public land-management agencies.

The wildfire management system's default response is to suppress wildfire wherever and whenever possible, with few exceptions (3). It extends an urban fire service model into the wildlands. With fire exclusion as the primary solution to both community and wildland protection, risk reduction translates to fire suppression and landscape fuel reduction. As wildfire losses increase, the assumption that community protection should be a primary focus of federal wildfire management efforts has become entrenched within both agency culture and federal legislation.

But even as wildfire suppression costs and use of technology have skyrocketed, we are experiencing more damaging urban fires. Clearly, the answer to community adaptation resides in the communities themselves (2, 4), and until the WU fire problem statement is redefined to recognize the key role of structure ignition and focus on creating ignition-resistant communities, risk-reduction strategies will continue to be ineffective and insufficient.

The Right Response

In 2022, the US Forest Service released the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, outlining an ambitious goal of treating an additional 20 million acres of US Forest Service land and 30 million acres of other federal, tribal, state, and privately owned land "to address wildfire risks to critical infrastructure, protect communities, and make forests more resilient" (ref. 5; see also ref. 6). While federal land-management agencies-primarily the US Forest Service and Department of Interior-have been tasked with wildfire risk reduction, most wildfire ignitions are caused by humans and occur on private lands (7), including those that destroy a majority of structures in the western United States (8). Furthermore, what has often been considered a western United States issue has now come to the fore in locations with limited wildfire experience, such as Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and Lahaina, Hawaii, thus creating additional challenges. As a result, actions on private land are essential to achieving fire-adapted communities across the country.

The community disaster sequence occurs when more homes are ignited than responders can protect (Fig. 1). Once structures are burning in a community, they become sources of lofted embers, radiant heat, and flame contact. Thus, community fire growth can accelerate quickly, resulting in urban conflagration that's exacerbated in higher-density development due to structure-to-structure fire spread. Reducing the likelihood that a home will ignite interrupts the disaster sequence by enabling effective structure protection. New construction siting, design, construction materials, and landscaping requirements should take wildfire potential into account. This will improve community resilience and ensure that new development does not increase community risk. The best way to make existing wildfire-vulnerable developments ignition resistant is to work within the limited area of the "home ignition zone"-a home and its surroundings within 100 feet (which may include neighboring homes). There are ways to reduce home ignition risk. Homeowners should install nonignitable roofing materials and flame- and ember-resistant vents; clean gutters of flammable debris; ensure that wooden steps, fences, and decks do not directly contact a home's flammable materials; and remove flammable materials immediately surrounding buildings and under attached decks (9-11).

Initiating substantial changes to the built environment requires that all levels of society address deeply rooted cultural expectations and develop a fundamentally new paradigm for community and homeowner responsibility. Such changes will take time. Communities need robust evacuation planning, including resilient early warning systems, identification and enhancement of egress routes, and consideration of support for individuals with mobility difficulties that all recognize the complexity of individual decision-making during emergency events (12). The community disaster sequence typically occurs during extreme wind events; thus, ignition-prevention programs should address infrastructure resilience and human behavior under these conditions.

Unfortunately, many communities and local governments often lack the resources, budget, staff, and experience to implement and maintain parcel- and neighborhood-level risk-reduction measures. The practice of modifying the built environment to growing wildfire risk requires multidisciplinary understanding of wildfire behavior, structural ignition vulnerabilities, urban resilience, and landscaping vegetation. Such know-how is not intrinsic institutional knowledge for public land-management agencies. As such, an appropriate response may resemble public health measures, where protecting the host from infection (home ignition prevention) is emphasized over trying to eliminate the infectious agent (wildfire).

Community leaders and locally elected officials are central to implementing effective wildfire mitigation strategies. And these leaders require significant technical assistance and financial support from federal and state levels. They need administrative mechanisms to direct funding and technical assistance to communities; this will require enhanced interagency coordination among federal and state-level departments, which can administer resources to local jurisdictions. Initial efforts in California, Colorado, and Oregon are structuring home ignition mitigation programs on this model, with the underlying objective of delivering funding, support, and expertise to communities and individual residents (13-15).

A New Perspective

All such projects and reforms must recognize an important truth: The current wildfire management approach has inverted the wildfire problem. wildland fires do not, per se, encroach on communities. Rather, it's communities that have impinged on wildlands, where fires play an important ecological role. Predominant strategies continue to apply limited, risk-averse reactions that emphasize community protection at the expense of both resilient landscapes and safe, effective wildfire responses. Forward-looking ecological and practical thinking would help move communities away from continually degrading fire-adapted ecosystems and underinvesting in community resilience. Instead, this change in thinking will move toward a sustainable approach that consistently promotes ecological and human ecosystem benefits.

Communities and governments need to accept living with wildland fire. They must recognize that fire in the wildlands is ecologically appropriate and inevitable-and it does not significantly influence community fire destruction (16). To do this, we must communicate differently on the nature of the WU fire problem and the ecological necessity of wildland fire. We must empower our public land managers and tribal partners to utilize fire appropriately to sustain resilient ecosystems and adapt our communities to this natural reality.

Inasmuch as people and communities are implicated in the wildfire problem, so, too, are they part of the solution. Federal land-management agencies cannot resolve this crisis alone; we all have a role to play in reducing wildfire risk in the places we live. Stronger collaboration in public and private partnerships, such as those that increase alignment between insurance providers, residents, and local and state governments, could further encourage and incentivize risk-reduction measures at the individual parcel and neighborhood scale.

The Wildfire Partners Program in Boulder County, Colorado, offers a model for an integrated approach to wildfire mitigation. It supports homeowners in reducing risk on their property by local government providing technical and financial support, including individual home assessments, vulnerability reports, and grants to subsidize necessary work, while offering a platform where insurance providers actively engage with homeowners to retain coverage on mitigated homes (17). This interdisciplinary approach builds wildfire resiliency from the bottom up and helps temper the expectation that the federal government is exclusively responsible for community protection.

Wildfire risk is complex, and local context matters. The ability to adapt reflects the realities, resources, and diverse needs of any one community. Effective solutions must account for localized nuance (18). Federal and state administrations can help direct funding, assistance, and technical expertise for wildfire mitigation. Communities with high social vulnerability will likely need additional support.

The recent addendum to the "National Cohesive wildland Fire Management Strategy" (19) specifies an important goal: "Human populations and infrastructure are as prepared as possible to receive, respond to, and recover from wildland fire." Achieving this vision means confronting the failed approach of trying to remove fire from our landscapes. We must recognize that our communities were developed in a climate and environment that no longer exist. We have the tools and knowledge to reduce community wildfire risks. But we must address the profound and deeply rooted misalignment of political and social expectations regarding what it means to live with wildfire. Now is the time to invest in long-term, economically efficient solutions, rather than short-term, risk-averse tactics.

We have to live with wildland fire. We don't have to live with fire in our communities.


David Calkin, Kimiko Barrett, Jack Cohen, Mark Finney, Stephen Pyne, and Stephen Quarles wrote this article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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Across Pennsylvania and other northern U.S. states, climate change -- from burning oil, coal and methane gas -- is increasing the number of winter days with minimum temperatures above freezing.

The phenomenon is known as "lost winter" and a Climate Shift Index analysis of temperatures showed more than 60% of 28 snow belt states are having at least one additional week of days above freezing.

Shel Winkely, a meteorologist and weather and climate engagement specialist for Climate Central, said winter weather will not be as cold for as long as it used to be.

"Temperatures that are below freezing -- so, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, or zero degrees Celsius -- those are important days," Winkely explained. "We found out how many days climate change has taken away overnight lows that are at or below the freezing temperature."

Winkley pointed out when you look at the 30-year average of snowfall for Pennsylvania, cities like Philadelphia now have only a 9% chance of seeing a white Christmas, with Pittsburgh faring a bit better at about 31%.

Winkley emphasized the loss of cold winter days can negatively affect some regions that depend economically on winter sports for recreation and tourism income. He added lost winter days can also contribute to a smaller snowpack, meaning less spring-melt water is available for municipal systems or agricultural operations.

"On the whole, the state, when you take the average over this decade -- again, 2014 to 2023 -- climate change added about 10 days per year above 32 degrees or so above freezing," Winkley reported.

Winkley noted the report does not mean winters are going away but the warming climate is making winters shorter and less intense.

"This doesn't mean that there's not cold, or that we're losing all of the cold," Winkley stressed. "We still have cold that is to be found. It just means that we're losing those classic winters. This isn't the winters that our parents experienced or that our grandparents experienced."


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By Ysabelle Kempe for Smart Cities Dive.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Lately, the city of Dallas has been hearing from local leaders across the U.S. and as far as London, England, said Rosana Savcic, a division manager in the city's code compliance department. What has caught their attention? A city policy that took effect in 2017 requiring landlords to provide working air conditioning equipment.

More cities are looking into establishing a renter's right to cooling equipment as climate change drives record-breaking temperatures across the world. Such rules codify tenants' right to housing that can be cooled to a specific maximum indoor temperature, a number that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Tenants may still be on the hook for their energy bills, however.

Right now, cities that require landlords to provide AC systems are the exception, not the rule, says V. Kelly Turner, a heat policy researcher and associate director of the University of California, Los Angeles' Luskin Center for Innovation.

That may be changing. Montgomery County, Maryland, passed a first-in-the-region law in 2020 requiring many landlords to provide AC equipment capable of cooling units to at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit from June through September. A 2022 Chicago law requires some large residential buildings or buildings for older people to provide AC in common spaces when the outdoor heat index exceeds 80 F. A New Orleans rule went into effect this year mandating AC equipment that can cool bedrooms to at least 80 F.

In New York City's sustainability plan, the nation's largest city indicates its intention to develop a summer indoor maximum temperature policy by 2030. In July, a NYC council member introduced legislation that would require landlords to provide AC equipment in the summer. Los Angeles County officials are in the early stages of developing a similar policy.

The case for cooling

The trend toward cooling requirements is part of a broader recognition that climate change necessitates new protections and policies, experts say.

"What we're learning is we have to develop policies specific to the issue of heat," said Ashley Ward, director of Duke University's Heat Policy Innovation Hub. In addition to rental cooling standards, heat-specific policy needs include worker protections and universal cooling for schools and prisons, Ward notes.

The major challenge proponents of rental cooling standards need to overcome, Ward says, is the public perception that air conditioning is a luxury, not a necessity. That perception "is why we can justify not having air conditioning in prisons. Forty percent of our schools in the U.S. have inadequate HVAC," Ward said. But as heat records get broken again and again, and heat-related deaths escalate, proponents see policymaker attitudes shifting.

Limitations of right-to-cooling policies

While rental cooling standards may be a step toward addressing urban heat impacts on residents, these policies aren't perfect solutions, Ward said.

Even if lower-income renters have AC equipment, they might not turn it on for fear of high energy bills. That's why some experts have urged states and cities to complement rental cooling standards with utility bill assistance programs that take cooling needs into account. States typically use much more of the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to help people with heating rather than cooling bills. And while the need for support is growing, the pot of available LIHEAP funding shrank from $6.1 billion in fiscal year 2023 to $4.1 billion in fiscal year 2024, according to a June report from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association and Center for Energy Poverty and Climate.

Cities need to start monitoring low-income households' ability to pay for cooling, Turner said in an email. That data could build a case for better supporting cooling through subsidy programs like LIHEAP.

Utilities can also help make cooling more affordable, explained Gregory Pierce, research and co-executive director of UCLA's Luskin Center and an associate professor of urban planning. State public utilities commissions can play a big role in imposing or encouraging utility-run energy affordability programs, but cities can pitch in on the effort, too, such as by collaborating with utilities on programs that make baseline amounts of energy more affordable for people, Turner said.

Tiered payment programs, for example, charge those who use a lot of electricity a higher rate than those who use less. Hotter weather, however, might mean those tiers need to be adjusted, so that the most affordable tier accounts for the amount of energy needed to cool the typical home, Pierce said.

"Not a lot of utilities have, I think, adjusted those tiers accordingly yet to account for AC, much less electrification," he said.

Any equity-oriented program must involve listening to community members about their specific struggles, Turner added. "There may be solutions we don't even know to think about because we need to hear from those that would be facing those tough choices," such as between turning on the AC and putting food on the table, she said.

Rental cooling standards also present other challenges. Cash-strapped landlords may struggle to undertake complex, expensive retrofits. Waste heat that AC equipment generates increases the urban heat island effect, and adding cooling equipment to buildings can drive up greenhouse gas emissions - although heat pumps allow building owners to simultaneously offer cooling and potentially replace fossil fuel-powered HVAC equipment.

How low should cities go?

Then there's the question of what cities should set as the maximum temperature in rental housing. Dallas' rule requires AC equipment that can keep rooms at least 15 degrees cooler than the outdoor temperature, with a maximum temperature threshold of 85 F. That means that even if it's 105 degrees outside, rental housing must be equipped to stay at 85 F or cooler.

Ward thinks cities should set the maximum temperature lower. She cites 73 F as the threshold for a good night's sleep and recovery. She recommends cities set a maximum temperature around 76 F, since fans can help bring the temperature down another couple of degrees.

However, over-debating the exact maximum temperature can stifle productive policymaking, Turner warned. She said she'd rather set the maximum temperature at 80 F and start a conversation about what it will take to implement the policy, including developing a complaint-reporting process and finding funding.

"To some degree, the question isn't, 'Can we get exactly [the right] temperature?' The question is, 'Can we get something on the books to at least give people a fighting chance of having a safe thermal environment?'" she said. "Once we do that, we can start to tinker."


Ysabelle Kempe wrote this article for Smart Cities Dive.


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Three environmental nonprofits filed suit Wednesday against the California Air Resources Board to oppose the expansion of a program allowing oil and gas companies to offset their pollution by buying credits from huge farms producing natural gas from animal waste.

Last month, the state amended the low carbon fuel standard to expand credits favoring biogas, arguing it removes methane from the waste stream and creates renewable power.

Tyler Lobdell, staff attorney for the nonprofit co-plaintiff Food and Water Watch, said the program is actually a perverse incentive for factory farms to get bigger.

"The biggest operators, the biggest polluters, are the most rewarded," Lobdell pointed out. "That is the incentive structure here. Go out and be as big and as polluting as possible, and you will see the largest reward from our program."

The low carbon fuel standard is intended to reduce carbon pollution by incentivizing the transition to clean cars. The lawsuit argued the credit program prioritizes pollution-heavy practices over sustainable solutions.

Lobdell noted manure only produces methane when large quantities are liquefied at concentrated animal feeding operations. He suggested the state require factory farms to manage their manure in ways which do not rely on anaerobic environments emitting methane.

"The real solution to addressing pollution is to reduce the pollution, not to monetize it and lock it in for generations," Lobdell contended. "We should be requiring these facilities to more sustainably manage their waste. That would have climate benefits, that would also have benefits to local air quality and to local water quality."

The lawsuit asks the court to require the California Air Resources Board to disclose, analyze and mitigate the environmental impact caused by the change to the low-carbon fuel standard. The other two plaintiffs include the nonprofits Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Limpio, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund.


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