Wildfires

Wildfires are growing larger and more destructive across the West due to climate change. Yet more people than ever are moving to fire-prone spaces near forests and grasslands. Some of the fastest housing growth in these areas is happening in the Mountain West.

It's been nearly one year since the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County, but there is another group of affected homeowners. Their houses are still standing, yet they do not feel safe returning home.

The location and proximity of homes destroyed in the Marshall Fire highlight the importance of fire mitigation efforts while building – and the possible long-term saving in planning for fire.

Researchers found that those wildfires increase the “occurrences of heavy precipitation rates by 38%” in our region, according to their work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As wildfire seasons stretch longer and fires burn hotter, researchers are digging into the resiliency of soil microbes critical to forest recovery.

A recent webinar discussed the costs of fire mitigation, home insurance, the need for better communication with homeowners living in the WUI, and how towns can put this information into practice.

The Center for American Progress published a pair of reports this month highlighting funding challenges for rural areas in the context of climate resilience, offering recommendations for how decision-makers can better design federal programs to be more inclusive of rural communities as disasters like wildfires and floods become more frequent.

While more than 37,000 people escaped the Marshall Fire last year, the chaos that ensued prompted an overhaul of how these communities evacuate.

A new study shows wildfires are burning more high-elevation areas, and that’s impacting the snowpack across the West.

“We're trying to make it easy for non-experts to find and use decision-relevant federal data to map and understand their exposure to climate-related hazards,” says Tom DiLiberto, a climate scientist at the NOAA Climate Program Office.