How can we adapt to the growing risk of wildfires? • FRANCE 24 English

How can we adapt to the growing risk of wildfires? • FRANCE 24 English

Well, it is wildfire season, of course, with devastating blazes burning across the Mediterranean, the United States, and Canada. And like numerous other extreme weather conditions or events, data suggests that record-breaking wildfires are essentially becoming the new normal. And as the international community again largely fails to commit to reducing carbon emissions and the pace of global warming, growing attention is being turned to management and adaptation. Well, my guest today is Dr. Melissa Sterry, a design scientist who specializes in building architectural and urban resilience to wildfires specifically. Uh Dr. Ster, thank you so much for joining us today. So uh for those who are not familiar with architectural innovations, wildfires, especially in urban environments, sound like something that it would be very very difficult uh to adapt to, at least in my view. So what does resilience to fires look like uh in an urban setting? It very much depends on the setting because fires are a product of their environment. So you have different kinds of wildfire. So there isn’t a one-sizefits-all. You have to understand what kind of threats are in the the place where you’re building. And those threats can include the topography which affects the physics of fire. So for example, you’re going to be much more at risk if you are um in a home that is on top of a slope. Um, also the foliage around you. Some foliage is very combustible. Um, and so there are there’s not one solution, but there are several. One of the clues uh for for design amid growing wildfire threats can be found in the behavior of fire adaptive plants amongst other kind of examples from nature so to speak. Can you talk uh more about that? Some of the most striking examples perhaps? Absolutely. Wildfire and plants on Earth have been evolving literally since plants first started to colonize uh land. And there are many many species that have evolved to live with fire. Some actually rely on it for their reproduction. And as far as for example the fires that we find in Europe are concerned, that’s really key because many of these plants actually spread fire. They have oils and they have other properties. Um but plants have different strategies and those strategies have um been adapted to the different fire conditions. So for example, you have some plants that almost create a back blast and they protect themselves through um essentially using up the oxygen um and and sort of distributing the fire away from themselves. That’s a defensive action. Some have really thick bark. Again, some of the plants in Europe have this like the core coke. And then others actually are sacrificial in the sense that the parent plant will die but upon its death the offspring will actually reproduce and very rapidly and uh they do that through among other things releasing their seeds upon the passing of the fire and that action is triggered by heat and or the chemicals in the smoke. So can you talk then about some of your work? I mean, how do you I know there’s no one-sizefitsall approach based on what you said there, but how do you use some of these examples from nature amongst, you know, your own expertise uh to turn this into concrete solution for people? So, my primary study area is the western United States, which actually has very similar ecologies to parts of Europe. And I’ve studied these various different plants um and the territories they’re in. And I’ve migrated that to architecture and the built environment. So rather than creating one set of uh building plans, three different sets of building plans, each one for a different kind of what we call a fire regime. That’s the parameters that you’re going to be dealing with. So for example, some fires travel very quickly, but they’re low intensity. And these are surface fires, and these are fires that spread through grasses. um that’s very relevant to Europe because we’ve got a lot of invasive grasses and grasses really thrive in fire. Um then you’ve got other kind of fires which are very intense. These are the kind of forest fires that you would associate with places like Canada or where there’s basically a lot of timber. There’s a lot of biomass burn. Now some of the heat intensities that you get in those fires, you cannot build a structure that is going to be fully resilient to it. So I’ve looked at the physics of these different plants, the biochemistry, the different properties that they have and how we can apply that to architecture and planning. Um, and also dovetailing in both the vernacular, the indigenous, the local architecture. So if you like low tech, good to go with a few adaptations and also bringing in state-of-the-art smart materials, engineering, information, communications, technology, all the clever stuff. So there’s a spectrum of ways that we can actually look to solve this problem if we look to nature which of course has already solved it. So there’s a lot to learn there. Dr. Saran, my understanding in some places there have been calls on public officials to simply ban people from living in fireprone areas altogether. One example uh being fast burning grasslands uh in California. I imagine since you say the vegetation is this is similar uh in France that there’s maybe a similar argument to be made here. Do you think that measures like this should be a part of adaptation strategies especially because I imagine that adaptive innovations can be expensive, difficult to put in place. Uh so so what do you think should how do you think that should factor in if at all? There are a lot of people that do argue for that and particularly the fire ecologists. I um argue that actually I don’t think that’s a realistic solution and for a couple of reasons. Number one, we’re not just facing wildfire as a threat. We’re facing the threat of flooding. We’re facing the threat of sea level rises. And when you start adding all of these up, frankly, there’s not much land left. Then you’ve got the fact that people are attached to the places that they live. They’ve got homes. They’ve got communities. And so there’s no panacea. You know, we don’t have an ideal solution here. So in my work, I look to the worst case scenarios. Okay, what can we do when we don’t have the luxury of being able to move away from the fireprone places for whatever reason? And um that in many ways is is a better design challenge because if you can design at that level well then hey you know if we are able to vacate some of those places where wildfires are present that just makes it easier but in my work I don’t assume that we can do that. Do you see a conflict between focusing on adapting to climate change and working to do more to prevent it? I mean, some argue that focusing too much on adaptation, on innovation gives the illusion that we can essentially adapt our way out of the most extreme climactic conditions. What’s your take on that? How can we strike an appropriate balance? That’s a really key point. Um, there are those that think that the technocratic solution is appropriate. And usually, as with many other things, when somebody says to you, there’s a one-stop solution here, you know, one-stop solution. and uh we we can invent this for you and we can sell it to you and we can manage it. There’s usually a bit of a catch to it. Um but certainly technologies can help us to do extraordinary things. I mean for example with the fires that are burning in Europe right now, I won’t be doing a field trip to go and see what happened there. I’ll be looking at the satellite footage and I will be looking at information that I can literally see from an array of technologies in space and that give me a fine grained detail and then I can dovetail that in with other with other data to get a really clear idea of how the fires move through the landscape and what was going on. But equally there are a lot of things that we can actually do in order to tackle this problem right now because it’s not just animals and it’s not just plants that have evolved to live with fire. If we look back through the history of humanity, we were living with fires. We gained control of uh fire. Actually, it’s likely Homo erectus before us gained control of fire. Um we have quite a a lot of fire craft historically and particularly as far as Europe is concerned. We need to bring that back in because land management is really key to this. Um, and we can also bring in some of these historic approaches to making your buildings and your towns more resilient that don’t require lots of technology. So, it’s fire is a mosaic. You will never find a fire anywhere where it’s it’s all completely homogeneous. It will be patchy. And that’s going to be the same approach I think that we need to apply to protecting our homes and our lives and our livelihoods. Dr. Melissa Sterry, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for joining. Thank you.

Devastating wildfires are burning across the Mediterranean, the United States and Canada. Like numerous other extreme weather conditions or events, data suggests record breaking wildfires are becoming the new normal. How can our societies adapt to this growing risk? Answer by Melissa Sterry, design scientist specialising in urban resilience to wildfire.
#wildfire #environment #adapt

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