Indonesia’s peatlands, California’s forests and, now, vast swathes of Argentine wetland have all been ravaged by extreme wildfires, heralding a fiery future and the dire need to prevent it.
With climate change triggering droughts and farmers clearing forests, the number of extreme wildfires is expected to increase 30 percent within the next 28 years. Moreover, they are now scorching environments that were not prone to burning in the past, such as the arctic’s tundra and the Amazon rainforest.
“We’ve seen a great increase in recent fires in northern Syria, northern Siberia, the eastern side of Australia and India,” Australian government bushfire scientist Andrew Sullivan, an editor on the report “Spreading like wildfire: The rising threat of extraordinary landscape fires” released yesterday by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and GRID-Arendal environmental communications group.
Photo: AFP
At the same time, the slow disappearance of cool, damp nights that once helped temper fires also means they are getting harder to extinguish, said a second study, “Warming weakens the nighttime barrier to global fire,” published last week in the journal Nature.
With nighttime temperatures rising faster than daytime ones over the past four decades, researchers found a 36 percent increase in the number of after-dark hours that were warm and dry enough to sustain fire.
“This is a mechanism for fires to get much bigger and more extreme,” said Jennifer Balch, lead author of the Nature study and director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Earth Lab.
“Exhausted firefighters don’t get relief,” which means they cannot regroup and revise strategies to tackle a blaze, she said.
The consequences of extreme fires are wide-ranging, from loss and damage to costly firefighting response. In the US alone, the UNEP report said the economic burden of wildfire totals as much as US$347 billion annually.
With California’s forests ablaze, the state government spent an estimated US$3.1 billion on fire suppression in the 2020-2021 fiscal year.
The fires raging since December in Argentina’s Corrientes Province have taken an enormous toll, killing Ibera National Park wildlife, charring pasturelands and livestock, and decimating crops including yerba mate, fruit and rice. Losses have exceeded 25 billion Argentine pesos (US$234 million), the Argentine Rural Society said.
The UNEP urges governments to rethink wildfire spending, recommending they put 45 percent of their budget toward prevention and preparedness, 34 percent toward firefighting response and 20 percent for recovery.
“In many regions of the world, most resources go toward response — they focus on the short-term,” said Paulo Fernandes, a contributing author of the UNEP report and fire scientist at Universidade of Tras-os-Montes and Alto Douro in Portugal.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) plans to make advanced 3-nanometer chips in Japan, stepping up its semiconductor manufacturing roadmap in the country in a triumph for Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s technology ambitions. TSMC is to adopt cutting-edge technology for its second wafer fab in Kumamoto, company chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said yesterday. That is an upgrade from an original blueprint to produce 7-nanometer chips by late next year, people familiar with the matter said. TSMC began mass production at its first plant in Japan’s Kumamoto in late 2024. Its second fab, which is still under construction, was originally focused on
DETERRENCE EFFORTS: Washington and partners hope demonstrations of force would convince Beijing that military action against Taiwan would carry high costs The US is considering using HMAS Stirling in Western Australia as a forward base to strengthen its naval posture in a potential conflict with China, particularly over Taiwan, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. As part of its Indo-Pacific strategy, Washington plans to deploy up to four nuclear-powered submarines at Stirling starting in 2027, providing a base near potential hot spots such as Taiwan and the South China Sea. The move also aims to enhance military integration with Pacific allies under the Australia-UK-US trilateral security partnership, the report said. Currently, US submarines operate from Guam, but the island could
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
Opposition parties not passing defense funding harms Taiwan’s national security, two US senators said separately in rare public criticism. “I am disappointed to see Taiwan’s opposition parties in parliament [the legislature] slash President [William] Lai’s (賴清德) defense budget so dramatically,” Roger Wicker, a Republican who chairs the US Senate Armed Forces Committee, said on social media. “The original proposal funded urgently needed weapons systems. Taiwan’s parliament should reconsider — especially with rising Chinese threats,” he added. Wicker’s post linked to an article published by Bloomberg that said that the two opposition parties’ move was “potentially jeopardizing the purchases of billions of dollars of
RSS