Adapting to growing wildfire property risk

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https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk7118

By JUDSON BOOMHOWER, Science. 

Excerpt: Wildfire-threatened communities are on the front lines of climate change. From 2013 to 2022, the share of global disaster losses caused by wildfires more than doubled compared with losses in previous decades (1). ...Radeloff et al. (2) draw on a 30-year time series of housing counts and vegetation to show how housing expansion, area burned, and vegetative fuels contribute to wildfire losses and the increasing number of homes at risk in the United States. With tens of millions of US homes now confronting a growing risk of destruction by wildfires, adaptation is an urgent policy and research challenge. Success will require scaling up cost-effective investments in physical protection to reduce wildfire losses, ensuring well-functioning insurance markets to absorb risk that cannot be cost-effectively mitigated away, and addressing disparities in protection and postfire recovery for socially vulnerable populations.... 

See also New York Times article America’s New Wildfire Risk Goes Beyond Forests. 

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