Destroyed homes, rising insurance premiums and forest management costs will make a fire in Los Angeles worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But these incredible figures hide a dark ledger that is silent and compounded for decades as climate change burns more intense and repeated flames.
Once the ash settles, the area is a burnt soil structure, contaminated basin, and an ecosystem where ecosystems are stripped of their natural defenses – an ecosystem that will be sucked away for years to come.
The numbers tell the story of brutal transformation. Over the past eight years, California wildfires have burned about three-quarters of the area it has committed in the past 30 years. This undermines California’s natural infrastructure. This has long supported its prosperity in a way that traditional metrics cannot capture. The most troublesome data is not found in the heading.
Tracking the surge in firefights and insured losses will miss the collapse of natural systems that provide water filtration, soil retention and carbon capture. These important natural functions do not exist on the balance sheet until failures begin to occur.
A sustained drought deepens the crisis. California currently faces 78 “fire days” per year. This is a ripe period of wildfire ignition than 50 years ago. In Palisades in the Pacific, even homeowners who followed all fire prevention guidelines were forced to evacuate in January, when historically not part of the fire season.
Fires today are also hotter and burn deeper, changing the landscape to unravel ecological developments over the centuries. As fire burns down forested hillsides, the immediate loss of trees is just the beginning. When forests are replaced by chaparrals, carbon capture capabilities will dramatically decrease and undermine efforts to mitigate climate change.
If the flame is strong enough to destroy the root system, it also changes the soil structure. The ground is where water has once been absorbed and filtered, and is repeated as water. Once soaked in aquifers, rain now competes across the surface, increasing the risk of flash floods and brings toxins from burned structures into water systems that serve millions of millions. Water treatment plants face rising costs due to contaminated runoff, with downstream farmland fighting irrigation water containing sediment.
The long-term economic and environmental consequences are extremely large. When the 2020 California fire released more than 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, it didn’t simply offset the state’s progress in reducing emissions. They changed the state from carbon pouring to carbon sources. After a camp fire levelled the town of paradise in 2018, water officials have discovered benzene and other carcinogens in local government water supplies, requiring an estimated $300 million repairs. Areas burned since 2017 will operate on a natural timeline, not ours, if billions of ecosystems are lost in value and there is a chance of recovery.
Wildfire Management has become a problem of collective behavior similar to vaccination and flood control. A single, undecided property threatens the entire community, just as uncontrolled federal forests overwhelm national resources.
California has tens of millions of dead trees to serve as a burning of the next mega fire, but there is no single entity with sufficient authority or resources to deal with the threat. The U.S. Forest Service manages much of California’s land, the state takes up a large portion of the burden on firefighters, and private property owners face some of the biggest consequences.
If homeowners invest in fire-resistant materials and protect their property by maintaining hillside stability, watershed quality and local air quality, broader benefits are insurance premiums and It is not entirely captured by the value of assets. Continuing development in high-risk areas increases costs, with one-third of California homes located in or near dense vegetation. Insurance companies will withdraw from high-risk areas, even if the home meets the fire safety code, and will repeatedly try to repeat past mistakes by removing property values from the environment.
A single fire releases particulate contamination that can damage thousands of times more than greenhouse gases, contaminates water supply with heavy metals from burned structures, alters the landscape and makes future fires more possible, and individuals can reveal inconsistencies between choices and community interests.
That’s why an integrated approach is needed. Natural systems should not respect administrative boundaries and should not even be our solutions. To break the cycle of escalating fire damage, fundamentally economic incentives need to be restructured to reflect the true value of natural infrastructure.
California is at a crossroads. Wildfires can continue to treat them as isolated disasters, measuring the cost of acres and burning costs, or collaboratively assess and maintain natural defenses. As California’s climate continues to warm, the question is not whether we can afford to make these changes anymore, but rather whether we can’t afford to do so.
Augusto Gonzalez-Bonorino is an economics instructor at Pomona College.
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