Wood markets play a critical role in wildfire prevention

Wildfires have devastated Western North Carolina in the past few months, only recently having been quelled by the work of hundreds of firefighters and well-timed rainfall. These disasters, which are often caused by humans but sometimes occur naturally, for instance those caused by a lightning strike, can have lasting implications ranging from the endangerment of flora, fauna, and human lives to the crippling of local economies that rely on tourism, to the devastating effects of erosion on newly exposed soils often resulting in floods and through loss of timber for industry and consumers. Despite the often-unpredictable path of these fires, much can be done to help prevent them. Through proactive sustainable management and maintenance of forests, foresters and partnerships between private landowners and the forestry industry play a crucial role to help reduce the risk of wildfires.

In a given year, there can be as many as 100,000 wildfires in the United States. More than 90 percent of these are attributable to human activity, with the remaining 10 percent attributed to natural causes like lightning strikes. These devastating blazes can burn for extended periods of time and create air quality issues, destroy homes and entire neighborhoods, decimate plant and animal life in their wake and sometimes burn so hot that they inflict irreparable soil damage, which can result in flooding and impact forest regeneration. While some fires are a necessary part of a forests’ lifecycle, human contributions to their spread often pushes them far beyond their natural course. However, people can be just as effective at preventing these fires as we are at igniting and fueling them.

A key component of wildfire prevention is preparation and the vigilant adherence to common forest management practices which can drastically reduce susceptibility to wildfires. The most cost effective method of reducing risk is thinning the forest to create space between trees, which makes it less likely that the fire will spread from tree to tree. This leaves smaller and unhealthy trees as well as branch debris, limbs and underbrush which is also fuel for the fire. Additionally, the accumulation of ‘ladder-fuel’ provide vertical continuity between surface fuels and canopy fuels, often dry, which means they can ignite much faster than live trees and offer the blaze a path between trees. Excessive ladder fuel buildup can allow smaller fires to grow quickly and hinder firefighters’ attempts to contain and control these blazes. This can be alleviated by the second most cost effective method of reducing the risk that hazardous fuels present: controlled fire or prescribed fire. Professional foresters are trained in the science of fire and they can use it safely, during times of appropriate weather, to reduce hazardous fuels and thus risk of catastrophic wildfire. Foresters use fire to prevent wildfire. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, N.C. Forest Service, U.S. National Park Service, N.C. Parks as well as private land managers employed these forest management methods to reduce fire risk.

Proactive forest management is incentivized by forest product sectors like the wood energy industry, which affixes new value to previously low-value thinned wood fiber. This makes thinning in more cases cost-effective. Through sustainable forest management techniques markets created, or bolstered by, forestry industry segments like wood energy, contribute to forests’ long term health. Wood energy is often sourced from wood fiber that is underutilized or has no other market in that region. The smaller trees thinned out support industry while at the same time reduce the occurrence and spread of wildfires.

North Carolina’s forest sector is a critical component of the state economy in addition to its role in forest conservation, like the prevention and control of fires. In 2013 the forest sector employed more than 70,000 people in North Carolina and generated $18.5 billion in gross state revenue. North Carolina’s vibrant forestry tradition and trade bodes well for long-term forest fire prevention, as it continues to encourage the adoption of long-established sustainable and renewable forestry practices.

Managed forests and the processes that foresters and landowners use to keep forests healthy are critical to the prevention of wildfire. The fires in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee caused catastrophic damage on many levels, but certain prevention techniques can help reduce future blazes’ frequency and aid in firefighters’ attempts to control and eventually extinguish them. These fires can do incomprehensible damage to homes and biomes. However, properly managed forests are a powerful tool for combating and reducing the occurrence of wildfires while also providing substantial economic impact for North Carolina year after year.

Dr. Joseph Roise is a professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Services at North Carolina State University’s College of Natural Resources and is an expert in application of operations research methodologies to forest management, valuation and planning, small diameter woody biomass harvesting and utilization, and wild land fire science.