In recent years, small towns, like Malden, Washington, have become victim to catastrophic fires that burned around them.

The three main factors that are leading to greater fire risk are a changing climate including hotter temperatures and drought, vegetative conditions and people choosing to live in homes built in or near forests, said Washington State University professor, school of the environment, Matthew Carroll, who studies how communities in the West can better adapt to “megafires.”

Conditions with large unkempt forest floors and debris have only gotten worse over the years as the techniques for fighting fire focused mostly on suppression and not about preventing it through prescribed burns or thinning trees, Carroll said.

The Legislature passed a bill last session that will direct $125 million every two years for forest health and wildfire prevention. That money will be broken down into three buckets: wildfire response, forest health and community resilience.

Find out more

The Spokesman-Review
The Neighbor

Linking agricultural land use, air quality, and climate, a Washington State University scientist offered a new way to understand and minimize health impacts from human-caused changes to our climate and environment.

Based at WSU Vancouver, lead author Deepti Singh, assistant professor in the School of the Environment, drew on hundreds of studies of climate change, air quality, agriculture, and public health to propose a “systems lens,” or scientific approach, that connects health risks with simultaneous environmental changes driven by human practices.

“The health consequences of air pollution, climate change, and transformations in agriculture are often discussed separately,” Singh said. “But these issues are all related—they have similar sources, and each one affects the others. Agricultural activities contribute to air pollution and affect regional climate patterns, while farm production and quality of crops are sensitive to air quality and climate conditions.

Find out more

Farm Progress