By Josie Garthwaite
Record-setting wildfires torched huge swaths of western states in 2020. They blotted out the sun, produced hazardous air pollution in cities far from the blazes and sent toxic smoke wafting clear across the country and beyond. Such far-reaching effects are no longer aberrations, Stanford scholars write in research published Jan. 12 in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wildfire smoke shrouded the San Francisco Bay Area and blocked sunlight on Sept. 9, 2020. (Image credit: Aaron Maizlish / Flickr Creative Commons)
The number of homes at direct risk from wildfires – and the investment in firefighting resources to protect them – is on the rise. Nearly 50 million homes in the U.S. now sit in the wildland-urban interface where houses are close to forests and highly combustible vegetation, according to the authors, led by Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences