Wet winters can paradoxically lead to more wildfires. A wet winter promotes lush vegetation growth, leading to more grasses, shrubs, and undergrowth. When summer arrives and these plants dry out, they turn into easily ignitable “fuel.” The dense growth from the wet season thus increases the overall amount of fuel available for fires. This issue is particularly affecting countries with Mediterranean, semi-arid, or temperate climates that experience distinct wet and dry seasons, but the UK shouldn’t be complacent.
Climate change is creating more weather extremes. Now, we have more rain in the winter but substantially less in the summer, which makes the wildfire season more aggressive. Also, because more people are living in the wildland urban interface, more homes and lives are potentially – and actually – exposed to the threat of wildfires.
In some countries (Australia, the US, parts of South America and the Mediterranean), wildfires have become an unavoidable reality, with seasonal outbreaks posing a consistent threat. While the UK hasn’t reached that level of wildfire risk, it is still critical to take proactive measures to prevent, mitigate, and control fires in our forests and moorlands. As climate patterns shift, the likelihood of wildfires becoming more frequent in the UK increases, making it essential to address this emerging risk now to protect our natural landscapes and communities. Embracing early prevention and effective containment strategies will help us prepare for and manage what may soon be an inevitable challenge.
There are many technologies and approaches now available and in development that can help reduce the number, severity, and impact of wildfires. For example, small, solar-powered sensors are increasingly used to provide ultra-early fire detection. The sensors (developed by Dryad Networks), mounted on trees and part of a network (called Silvanet), can detect heat, smoke, gas, and flames when fires are at an early stage and alert responders before a fire is too large to easily contain.
Sensors mounted on trees can be paired with satellites, which of course provide a high-level view of a fire and the way it is spreading to best inform strategy for controlled burns and evacuations. Controlled burns of ground fuel can help stop wildfires from spreading or starting; when a fire reaches burned fuel, such as burned grass, it usually can’t spread further on the ground and can only spread when burning fuel is carried by winds.
There are more technologies being developed, partially inspired by the XPrize Wildfire competition, which challenges organisations to develop solutions that detect and suppress potentially destructive wildfires within 10 minutes. Such solutions include drone fleets that can fly below the tree canopy to extinguish fires on the ground. Sensors provide the ultra-early detection that then can alert firefighters to dispatch drones to extinguish a fire much faster than it would take for firefighters to arrive at the scene, by which time a fire could already have grown too large to be easily and quickly contained.
The combination of climate-driven rainfall shifts and warmer temperatures makes the wet-winter-to-dry-summer cycle a growing problem for many regions around the world, raising the likelihood of extreme wildfire events in years to come. The UK has a window of opportunity to integrate advanced wildfire detection and containment technologies before wildfire risks intensify. Deploying ultra-early detection systems can prevent small fires from escalating into major threats.
Carsten Brinkschulte is the CEO and co-founder of Dryad Networks, which uses solar-powered IoT sensors to detect wildfires early and monitor forest health. By 2030, Dryad aims to prevent millions of hectares of forest from burning, significantly reducing CO2 emissions and biodiversity loss.