The California 2070 Project: Megafires

The year is 2070. The location, Berkeley, California. It’s a warm summer evening, and a humid breeze blows through the grass. The sun is setting over the hills, and the sky is ablaze with orange, red, and purple streaks. You’re content, the temperature soothing and the fabric of your shirt and shorts soft. You hear the bugs chirping around you, waking now that the sun is set. Above you, the darkening sky is giving way to tiny pinpricks of stars. You gaze up at them and the wide stretch of Milky Way, awestruck, peaceful, content. There’s nothing to block your view. No branches or leaves get in the way—all the woodlands burned down decades ago. 

 California megafires are on track to destroy the entirety of the state’s forests by the year 2070. In such a future, the state’s landscape will look drastically different. The old, stately timberlands that attracted lumber business and inspired a nationwide conservation movement in decades past will be entirely replaced by scrub, grassland, and desert—ecology types that rebound quickly after fire, or that don’t burn at all. This will have irreversible impacts on the carbon cycle. Currently, carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere into forests and turned into biomass—leaves, deadwood, and soil. Thus forests act as a type of carbon reservoir. As of 2015, California forests were harboring 33.6 million tons of carbon annually. When forests burn, the carbon stored within its biomass is released back into the atmosphere. With the loss of California’s woodlands, the carbon stored within them will be released back into the atmosphere, contributing to an already-concerning carbon cycle that promotes the effects of climate change. New ecology types that replace woodlands—grasslands and scrub—will not be able to absorb carbon at anywhere near the same efficacy. In fact, the current rate of California forestland losses totals to roughly 1.2 million tons of carbon emitted back into the atmosphere every year.      

Biodiversity will significantly decrease as species that made their homes in the forests either die out or migrate to new regions. The white-headed woodpecker and Grace’s warbler, for example, limited to the pine woods of the West Coast, are some of many species that face potential extinction. Teams of state and federal biologists are often deployed to try and relocate highly-sensitive species when fires do occur. This involves collecting as many animals (typically fish and frogs) as possible in a mad rush and depositing them in suitable environments someplace else. As fires advance across the state, however, suitable environments become more and more difficult to find. Species that used to thrive across California are becoming fewer and fewer in number. For example, the mountain yellow-legged frog used to be abundant across Southern California, but wildfire-caused habitat destruction has reduced the frogs’ population to less than 400 individuals. Recovery programs have been launched to try and repopulate the region, but they are tricky to finance, present problems about releasing captive-born animals into the wild, and of course, they face the issue of a lack of habitat into which to release the species at all. As fires advance across the state, hundreds of species are faced with relocation and extinction.      

Human relocation and resettlement will be widespread as well. By 2070, we can expect megafires to be a common occurrence in the new California grasslands, and the construction of human habitats in such an area thereby unlikely (save for a business or governmental campaign incentivizing settlement). The decades between now and 2070 will probably see mass displacement, with annual refugee situations as fires grow in intensity and size and consume more and more towns. Urban crowding is one likely result as countryside residents flee for fire-insulated cities, exacerbating already-dire housing crises in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Another likely result is a mass exodus of California residents into neighboring states that are more affordable and less likely to burn. 

Air quality will worsen during the years in which the woodlands are eaten away, not just in California but across the country as smoke is carried from coast to coast. (However, once the forests are gone and the fires have only shrubbery left to burn, smoke production won’t be too much of an issue and air quality should return to a healthy level.)

The size of these fires, their longevity, and the area which they burn are all set for a dramatic increase over the next fifty years. Since 1972, California’s yearly net burned area has grown fivefold, and the fires themselves have become 800% larger. This can be attributed to rising temperatures. Northern California summers have warmed by roughly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1970s. With less rain and dryer conditions, each incremental increase in heat makes it easier for vegetation to catch flame. Simple events can spur the next blaze—a hammer strike, an electrical line short, and lightning strikes have all been past culprits. With temperatures projected to continue increasing, megafires require less and less of a spark to start. 

Graph of vegetation water weight at Blackberry Hill in the South Bay. Heavier water weight indicates vegetation that is more difficult to burn—2021 is seeing record lows.

To avoid a future like the one depicted in this article, complete derailment of our current carbon consumption path is needed. Total divestment from fossil fuels and a switch to renewable energy sources is necessary. Systems of animal agriculture must be restructured to decrease methane and carbon production. On a smaller and more localized level, prescribed burns must become commonplace so as to decrease vegetation density and enable the woodlands to undergo their natural process of regeneration. Prescribed burning, practiced by indigenous groups around the world for millennia, is returning to mainstream fire control methods. Fire suppression was the primary tactic used by the U.S. government during the 1900s, and it created dense forests with thin trees that were perfect for catching flame and leading to huge blazes. Fire suppression laws were invoked harshly against native populations and still are in some regions—in fact, indigenous tribes that practice prescribed burns can be subject to criminal penalties. However, prescribed burning is one of the best ways to prevent the megafires that plague California today. Healthy burns are necessary to maintain the vitality of forests, and spur a process of regenerative growth that allows for new life and clearing of old, dead shrubbery. Incorporating prescribed burning into the federally-regulated forest-maintenance regimen is necessary for preventing the barren California toward which we are currently headed. 

The 2070 we currently face is not catastrophic, only different—on a very macro level, humanity will be fine and the land itself simply altered. Yet when we look at the specifics of the damage—the multitudes of people displaced, the wildlife driven extinct, and the pain caused to countless individuals for decades—it becomes clear that this predicted 2070 is a doomsday scenario. Avoiding it is a matter of redefining the systems of energy, economy, and trade upon which we currently rely. It is not an impossible task, but it is a taxing one. Personally, I don’t know that we will overcome it, but I’d like to believe that the Berkeley, California of 2070 looks the same as the Berkeley, California of 2021.