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Human and infrastructure exposure to large wildfires in the United States

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 1343–1351 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

An increasing number of wildfire disasters have occurred in recent years in the United States. Here we demonstrate that cumulative primary human exposure—the population residing within the perimeters of large wildfires—was 594,850 people from 2000 to 2019 across the contiguous United States (CONUS), 82% of which occurred in the western United States. Primary population exposure increased by 125% in the CONUS in the past two decades; it was noted that there were large statistical uncertainties in the trend analysis due to the short study timeline. Population dynamics from 2000 to 2019 alone accounted for 24% of the observed increase rate in human exposure, and an increased wildfire extent drove the majority of the observed trends. In addition, we document the widespread exposure of roads (412,155 km) and transmission powerlines (14,835 km) to large wildfires in the CONUS, with a relative increase of 58% and 70% in the past two decades, respectively. Our results highlight that deliberate mitigation and adaptation efforts to help societies cope with wildfires are ever more needed.

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Fig. 1: Population exposure to large fires from 2000 to 2019.
Fig. 2: Contribution of population dynamics to primary population exposure to large fires from 2000 to 2019.
Fig. 3: Road and powerline exposure to large fires from 2000 to 2019.

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Data availability

The fire-burned-area data are available through the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity programme at https://www.mtbs.gov/index.php/direct-download. The gridded population dataset (WorldPop) is available at https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/WorldPop_GP_100m_pop#description. The road shapefiles are available through TIGER: US Census Roads at https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/TIGER_2016_Roads#description. Finally, the electricity power grid data are available at https://zenodo.org/record/3538890#.Yg6cFN_MKHs.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Joint Fire Science Program (Bureau of Land Management, US Department of the Interior) grant number L21AC10247. Any use of trade, firm or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Arash Modaresi Rad, Nicholas Hudyma & Mojtaba Sadegh

  2. Department of Management of Complex Systems, University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA

    John T. Abatzoglou

  3. Western Geographic Science Center, US Geological Survey, Boise, ID, USA

    Jason Kreitler

  4. Department of Bioresource Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Mohammad Reza Alizadeh

  5. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Amir AghaKouchak

  6. Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Amir AghaKouchak

  7. Bureau of Land Management, National Interagency Fire Center, Boise, ID, USA

    Nicholas J. Nauslar

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Contributions

M.S., A.M.R. and J.T.A. conceived the study and wrote the first draft of the paper. A.M.R. conducted all analyses. A.M.R., J.T.A., J.K., M.R.A., A.A., N.H., N.J.N. and M.S. contributed to the study design, results assessment and interpretation, and the writing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Mojtaba Sadegh.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Palaiologos Palaiologou and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–11 and Tables 1 and 2.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

Human exposure within different buffers from wildfire perimeters.

Supplementary Data 2

Contribution of population dynamics to human exposure to wildfire.

Supplementary Data 3

Road exposure within different buffers from wildfire perimeters.

Supplementary Data 4

Powerline exposure within different buffers from wildfire perimeters.

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Modaresi Rad, A., Abatzoglou, J.T., Kreitler, J. et al. Human and infrastructure exposure to large wildfires in the United States. Nat Sustain 6, 1343–1351 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01163-z

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