essay on causes of forest fire

Essay on Forest Fires

Students are often asked to write an essay on Forest Fires in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Forest Fires

Introduction.

Forest fires, also known as wildfires, are uncontrolled fires that rapidly spread across vegetation and forests. They pose a significant threat to both wildlife and human communities.

Causes of Forest Fires

Forest fires can be caused by natural factors like lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions, or even the sun’s heat. However, human activities like campfires, cigarette butts, or burning of debris often cause many fires.

Effects of Forest Fires

Forest fires can lead to loss of wildlife, destruction of habitats, and air pollution. They also contribute to global warming by releasing stored carbon dioxide.

Prevention and Control

Preventing forest fires involves careful handling of fire in forest areas and regular clearing of dry vegetation. When a fire does occur, firefighters use techniques like creating fire breaks to control and extinguish it.

250 Words Essay on Forest Fires

Forest fires, also known as wildfires, are uncontrolled fires that rapidly spread across vegetation and forest areas. These fires pose a significant threat to both the environment and human life, causing extensive damage and ecological disruption.

Forest fires can be ignited by natural causes like lightning and volcanic eruptions. However, human activities contribute significantly to these fires. Carelessness, such as leaving campfires unattended or discarding cigarettes, and intentional acts like arson, are common human-induced causes. Additionally, climate change exacerbates forest fires by creating drier, hotter conditions.

Impact on Biodiversity

Forest fires can have a profound impact on biodiversity. They destroy habitats, leading to the loss of plant and animal species. The smoke and ash can also disrupt the natural life cycles of surviving organisms.

Forest Fires and Climate Change

Forest fires contribute to climate change by releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This exacerbates the greenhouse effect, leading to global warming. Conversely, climate change increases the risk of forest fires, creating a vicious cycle.

Preventing forest fires requires a combination of public awareness, strict enforcement of laws, and effective forest management. Controlled burns and creating firebreaks are commonly used techniques to control fires.

Forest fires pose a serious threat to our environment and biodiversity. Understanding their causes and impacts, and implementing effective strategies for prevention and control, is crucial for the preservation of our forests and the planet at large.

500 Words Essay on Forest Fires

Forest fires, also known as wildfires, are uncontrolled fires that rapidly spread across vegetation and forest areas. They are a natural and essential part of many ecosystems, helping to maintain biodiversity and promote growth. However, when these fires become too frequent or severe, they can cause immense damage to both the environment and human life.

The Causes of Forest Fires

Forest fires can be ignited by both natural and human-induced factors. Natural causes include lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions, and spontaneous combustion of dry vegetation. On the other hand, human-induced causes encompass agricultural practices, such as slash-and-burn, irresponsibly discarded cigarettes, unattended campfires, and arson. Climate change also plays a significant role in exacerbating forest fires. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, and erratic weather patterns create a tinderbox situation that makes forests more susceptible to fires.

The Impact of Forest Fires

The impact of forest fires is multifaceted, affecting the environment, wildlife, and humans. Environmentally, fires release vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. They also destroy habitats, threatening biodiversity. For wildlife, forest fires can result in displacement, injury, or even death. For humans, besides the obvious threat to life and property, forest fires can cause long-term health issues due to smoke inhalation and can impact local economies reliant on forestry.

Forest Fires and Ecosystems

Despite their destructive nature, forest fires play a crucial role in the health of certain ecosystems. They can help clear out dead and decaying matter, allowing for new growth and regeneration. Some plant species even require the intense heat of a fire to release their seeds. However, when fires occur too frequently or burn too hot, they can inhibit the ecosystem’s ability to recover.

Forest Fire Management

Managing forest fires is a complex task that involves prevention, mitigation, and recovery. Prevention strategies include public education about fire safety, enforcing strict regulations on activities that can cause fires, and monitoring high-risk areas. Mitigation involves creating firebreaks, conducting controlled burns to reduce available fuel, and developing early warning systems. Post-fire recovery includes reforestation efforts and providing support to affected wildlife.

Forest fires pose a significant and complex challenge. As climate change continues to intensify, the frequency and severity of these fires are likely to increase, making effective management strategies even more critical. While they are a natural part of many ecosystems, the balance is delicate, and human activities can quickly tip the scales towards destruction. It’s crucial that we understand and respect this balance, taking the necessary steps to prevent and manage forest fires effectively, for the sake of our planet and future generations.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Fire Safety
• Essay on Fire Incident
• Essay on Fire

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Wildfires: How They Form, and Why They're so Dangerous

Everything you need to know about wildfires.

Biology, Ecology, Conservation, Earth Science, Geography

Wildfire in Custer, South Dakota

Branches and trees on fire in Custer State Park, South Dakota

Photograph by Mark Thiessen

As deadly wildfires continue to rage across Northern California’s wine country, with winds picking up speed overnight and worsening conditions to now include a combined 54,000 acres of torched land, it now seems more important than ever to understand how wildfires work, and their lasting implications on our health and the environment.

How a Wildfire Starts

Though the exact source of Sonoma County’s wildfires is unclear, authorities have pointed to the fact that 95 percent of fires in the state of California are started by people, according to CNN.

Meteorologists aren’t yet able to forecast wildfire outbreaks, but there are three conditions that must be present in order for a wildfire to burn. Firefighters refer to it as the fire triangle: fuel, oxygen, and a heat source. Four out of five wildfires are started by people, but dry weather, drought, and strong winds can create a recipe for the perfect disaster—which can transform a spark into a weeks- or months-long blaze that consumes tens of thousands of acres.

Another possible cause of forest fires is lightning. Scientists have found that every degree of global warming sets off a 12 percent bump in lightning activity. Since 1975 the number of fires ignited by lightning has increased between two and five percent.

A Tricky Relationship

Historically, wildfires are actually supposed to be beneficial to certain natural landscapes, clearing underbrush in forests and triggering the release of seeds in some plant species, such as the Jack pine.

Unfortunately, the suppression of naturally occurring, low-intensity forest fires has actually aided in the ability for high-intensity wildfires to run rampant.

In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service suffered from what historian Stephen Pyne calls “pyrophobia,” or the desire to suppress all wildfires (even the good ones). Since the science of forestry first took root in temperate Europe, which is home to a vastly different forest ecosystem than those found in the United States, fire was seen by early U.S. foresters as a problem caused by people.

In some places, the path toward a safer, more ecologically sound relationship with fire is being blazed with prescribed fire, and what’s being called by officials as “managed wildfire.” Fire crews put their efforts to suppress wildfires around the most fire-prone areas, such as communities, municipal watersheds, and sequoia groves. Otherwise they are learning to let some fires burn themselves out, as nature intended.

Wildfires Can Have Long-Lasting Implications for Our Planet

Forest fires actually have the ability to heat up the entire planet, a NASA study from 2016 revealed. In ecosystems such as boreal forests , which store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, the effects of climate change are playing out twice as fast.

Fires ravaged the boreal forests of Canada’s vast north woods in May 2016 and continued for months, consuming millions of acres of trees, and scorching the rich organic soil on the forest floor, which serves as a large reservoir for carbon . For every degree that our planet warms, the forest needs a 15 percent increase in precipitation to compensate for increased dryness.

Similar to the case in Northern California, investigators believe that Canada’s boreal forest fire was caused by humans.

Barack Obama visited Alaska in 2015 to highlight the dangers of climate change, calling up images of the hundreds of wildfires that burned across the state just that summer. At the time, 2014 had been the warmest year on record, a milestone that has now been surpassed by 2016.

The Effects of Fire on People

Worldwide, wildfire smoke kills 339,000 people a year, mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates. Tenfold increases in asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions have also been reported when smoke blankets the places where people live.

Common in places such as the western United States, layers of stagnant air called inversions can be created by fires and are responsible for holding smoke down where people breathe. Airborne, microscopic particles that slip past the body’s defenses and into the farthest reaches of the respiratory system can begin to coagulate the blood, forming a thick goo. Smoke also contains carbon monoxide, causing long-lasting damage to the heart.

Emergency room visits for heart failure jumped 37 percent, and saw a 66 percent increase for breathing problem-related visits following the smokiest days of a big 2008 peat fire in eastern North Carolina, EPA researchers found.

How Fire Impacts Wildlife

Wildlife tend to have a very different relationship with fire. Some have evolved to live with it, and some even thrive after fires. That’s not to say all wild animals call fire a friend—there are some who can’t outrun the quickly moving flames, and young or small animals are particularly at risk.

Slow-moving animals such as koalas, whose natural instinct is to crawl up further into a tree, may end up trapped.

For many environments, fire doesn’t actually have to mean death, but instead change, re-birth, or new opportunities. For example, woodpeckers will fly in to feast on bark beetles in dead and dying trees, and leave when the beetles are gone.

A year-old forest will have a different set of flora and fauna inhabiting it than a forest that is 40 years old, and according to wildlife biologist Patricia Kennedy, “a lot of species require that reset,” which comes from a fire.

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Production Manager

Program specialists, specialist, content production, last updated.

October 19, 2023

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

• IAS Preparation
• Current Affairs

Forest Fires

There has been a constant rise in forest fires in 2021 in some of the world’s coldest regions. This is an impact of climatic change and global warming.

According to a report from Down to Earth, wildfires have emitted around 1.76 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in November 2021. Forest departments claim that many fire incidents are man-made, sometimes caused deliberately.

Climate change in India and across the world has been a major cause of concern for environmentalists and conservationists. Thus, IAS aspirants must thoroughly go through the effects, causes, prevention and more discussed about forest fires further below in this article.

The following article explains the concept of forest fire and its causes to help students prepare for UPSC Prelims .

What is a Forest Fire?

Forest fires are wildfires that spread uncontrollably, burning plants, animals, grasslands and brushlands that fall in their path. The wind spreads the fire rapidly, causing significant air pollution.

Generally, fires that continue for longer or are highly inflammable are caused by climatic changes. There are also instances of forest fires caused by humans, lightning and extreme drought .

Forest fires have become a global concern as many countries face significant life and property losses. Moreover, the carbon dioxide released into the air due to forest fires causes lung and skin infections in humans.

In India, forest fires generally occur during March and April when the ground is filled with dry logs, hay, weeds, woods and leaves. In some instances, the friction from rubbing branches leads to forest fires, when the temperature is high or extremely dry.

Students collecting materials on forest fires for UPSC notes should know that extreme soil moisture deficiency increases wildfire risk. Indian states like Uttarakhand are prone to such forest fires.

Burning of forests for livelihood or excessive irrigation falls under forest fire causes.

Reckless behaviour like a carelessly discarded cigarette butt or matchstick can lead to big accidents. According to the Indian Express, the Simlipal forest fire was caused by villagers burning dry leaves to collect mahua flowers.

Nevertheless, students preparing for IAS and UPSC exam should be aware of the major forest fires in India and other countries.

Given below are a few other related links in line with the UPSC Syllabus for the reference of candidates:

Major Forest Fires in 2021

• Wildfires in Siberia affected the western region around Tyumen and Omsk in early 2021. As per the Moscow Times, nearly 40 million acres of land have burned down in Siberia. The eastern part of the region, like the Sakha Republic in the northeast, suffered major damage.
• North America saw extreme temperature and heat waves in July and August. Lytton city in Canada recorded a temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius, causing a series of wildfires.
• The Mediterranean region suffered major wildfires leading to an increase in PM levels up to 2.5. Turkey, Tunisia and Italy suffered the worst wildfires.

Instances in India

• The Himachal Pradesh and Nagaland-Manipur border saw prolonged fires in January.
• There was a major wildfire between February and March in the Simlipal National Park in Odisha.
• According to the Indian Express, Southern Chhattisgarh, Central Odisha, Western Maharashtra, and areas of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are highly prone to forest fires.
• Bandhavgarh Forest Reserve in Madhya Pradesh and sanctuaries in Gujarat also witnessed forest fires.
• According to the Indian Express, Uttarakhand witnessed nearly 1,000 forest fires over the last six months, up to April 2021.

Apart from the significant incidents, UPSC 2022 aspirants should know the effects of the forest fire.

Effects of Forest Fire

• Forest fires can impact the economy as many families and communities depend on the forest for food, fodder and fuel.
• It burns down the small shrubs and grasses, leading to landslides and soil erosion.
• Burning of forests causes smoke and poisonous gas emissions that result in significant health issues in humans.
• Loss of trees can disrupt the climatic conditions and break down the carbon chain.
• Wildfires damage the habitat of animals, causing them to wander in cities. Many die in the fires, unable to escape.
• These fires destroy the vegetation, soil quality and overall flora and fauna.

Individuals can read this article to learn about forest fires for their IAS and UPSC preparation . Additionally, they can check the updates on news channels to know the current affairs , and crack their UPSC exam with ease.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the man-made causes of forest fires.

Wildfires can be caused when a source of naked flame from electric spark, cigarettes or bidi comes in contact with combustible material.

What are the three types of forest fires?

The three types of forest fires are crown fire, surface fire and ground fire. Ground fire occurs on land and spreads slowly. Crown fires pose a high risk as they can spread from one tree to another. However, surface fires are usually smaller and cause the least damage.

What is firebreak? How is it helpful to stop wildfires?

Firebreak is a method to stop wildfires by getting rid of fuels like grass and trees. Ideally, firefighters remove the fuels along the path a fire is advancing.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

• Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
• Climate Change
• Policy & Economics
• Biodiversity
• Conservation

Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest

• ESSENTIAL BRIEFING 3 times weekly
• TOP STORY ROUNDUP Once a week
• MONTHLY OVERVIEW Once a month
• Enter your email *
• Name This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

What Causes Wildfires?

In recent years, stories of widespread wildfires are impossible to miss in climate change-related news. Unprecedented fires have destroyed millions of hectares of land, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and eliminated entire habitats across the world. We take a look at what causes wildfires and what we can do to prevent them.

Even if you don’t closely follow the news, you would have heard of the unprecedented and record-breaking fires that have hit several regions across the globe in recent years. Between 2019 and 2021, immense wildfires burned down more than 1 million hectares of land in Siberia , killed nearly 3 billion animals in southeastern Australia , and took hundreds of buildings down across the US state of California . 

As we reflect on the consequences of these extreme events and study solutions to mitigate their impact and prevent them from happening on such a large scale, it is important that we understand what causes wildfires in the first place. 

You might also like: Top 12 Largest Wildfires in History

How Do Wildfires and Bushfires Start?

The risk of a fire developing is driven by three main factors: 

• Dry fuel such as leaves, grass, branches, and other organic materials
• Oxygen in the air
• Heat to ignite and burn

The latter can be a natural event, such as lightning strikes or spontaneous ignition, or it can be directly linked to human activities, such as vehicle fires, cigarette butts, or campfires. But what are the most common ignition sources of wildfires around the world?

Natural Causes of Wildfires

Lightning is the most common ignition source that causes the vast majority of wildfires. There are two types of lightning: cold and hot. Cold lightning is usually of short duration and thus rarely a cause of wildfires. The same cannot be said of hot lightning: currents in hot lightning have less voltage but occur for a longer period of time. Because of the intense heat it generates, hot lightning accounts for the majority of natural fires. While this natural phenomenon is completely unpredictable, adequate land management and landscape fire management planning can significantly diminish the intensity of wildfires and prevent unnecessary deaths and the displacement of people and animals. 

Climate change is undoubtedly the biggest trigger of extreme lightning storms. Warmer and longer summers heat up the land surface. This, coupled with an increase in carbon emissions, causes stronger updrafts that are more likely to produce more powerful and frequent lightning. A 2014 study estimates a 12% increase in the frequency of lightning strikes with every one degree Celsius increase in temperature.  

In Canada’s province of British Columbia , for example, hot lightning causes 60% of the region’s wildfires in an average year. The devastating and record-breaking 2020 Bay Area fire that destroyed 5 million acres of land, over 10,000 structures and killed 33 people was also a consequence of lightning storms . These hit the state following two intense heat waves which saw record high temperatures all over the west coast occurring over multiple days. 

As mentioned before, fuel is one of the three components needed for a wildfire to start. This often comes in the form of dry vegetation. Elevated temperatures and low winter-time precipitation often leave vegetation primed for wildfires. This was the case in California in 2021 , which experienced a 65% rise in dry vegetation in just a few months. Similarly, several parts of Australia are characterised as a hot and dry climate and have recorded a steady decline in rainfall since 1970, making wildfires a regular occurrence. 2019 was the warmest year on record and it was accompanied by 43 extremely warm days. Not coincidentally, in the same year, the country experienced a bushfire crisis that resulted in the destruction of 11 million hectares of bush, forest, and parks in the states of New South Wales and Victoria. 

Human-Induced Wildfires

Humans are also often responsible for initiating wildfires, either accidentally or intentionally.  Human-related events that can ignite fires range from open burning such as campfires, equipment failure, and the malfunction of engines to debris burning, negligent discarding of cigarettes on dry grounds as well as other intentional acts of arson. The latter accounts for one of the most common causes of wildfires . 

According to government sources , 40% of wildfires that affect British Columbia in an average year are human-induced. In the US, the amount is more than double, with nearly 85% of the nearly 100,000 wildland fires that affect North America every year caused by human activities, according to data from the National Park Service . Here, man-made fires have tripled the length of North America’s fire seasons between 1992 and 2012, from 46 to 154 days. Over the 21-year study period, the major causes were debris burning and arson, while campfires and fireworks were responsible for ‘only’ 5% of fires. Furthermore, an analysis of more recent California fires found that human-sparked wildfires are more extreme and destructive than nature-induced ones as they move more than twice as fast, spreading about 1.83 kilometres per day. 

You might also like: 15 Worst Wildfires in US History

How Can We Solve the ‘Wildfire Pandemic’?

While almost all human-made wildlife fires are preventable, predicting Mother Nature is more complicated. However, every action to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming can effectively reduce the risk of extreme weather events such as lightning strikes and thus decrease the chances of wildlife fires. Furthermore, steady temperatures and rainfall can drastically reduce the amount of dry vegetation. 

Concretely, countries around the world are passing policies to regulate land management. In January 2022, the Biden administration announced a multibillion-dollar plan to make forests more resilient and reduce the risk of wildfires on up to 20 million hectares of land near vulnerable communities. The US government plans to do so by using thinning and intentional burning to restore forests and make them fire-adaptive . The move came after the Trump administration cut funding to research into the issue, undermining the risks of wildfires. 

As the burning of vegetation related to deforestation practices is among the leading causes of wildfires, environmental laws and policies that can provide critical backstops for ecosystems at risk, including forests, are also necessary. The Deforestation Pledge of more than 100 countries at the 26th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) is certainly a step in the right direction. However, promising to end deforestation is not enough. Now, countries need to step up their efforts by lining up funding and quickly strengthening forest protection laws.

Keeping fires under control is crucial if we want to preserve wildlife and vegetation and avoid undesirable health problems and diseases caused by air pollution from smoke and ash. 

This story is funded by readers like you

Our non-profit newsroom provides climate coverage free of charge and advertising. Your one-off or monthly donations play a crucial role in supporting our operations, expanding our reach, and maintaining our editorial independence.

About EO | Mission Statement | Impact & Reach | Write for us

About the Author

Martina Igini

15 Biggest Environmental Problems of 2024

4 Biggest Environmental Issues in the Philippines in 2024

Water Shortage: Causes and Effects

Hand-picked stories weekly or monthly. We promise, no spam!

Boost this article By donating us $100, $50 or subscribe to Boosting $10/month – we can get this article and others in front of tens of thousands of specially targeted readers. This targeted Boosting – helps us to reach wider audiences – aiming to convince the unconvinced, to inform the uninformed, to enlighten the dogmatic.

Dangers, Causes, and Effects of Wildfires Essay

Wildfires have become a significant environmental concern that threatens the sustainability of natural resources and endangers human lives. Continuous human impact on the planet causes inevitable changes in the ecosystems that result in such disastrous events as wildfires. The dangers and adverse effects they impose call for immediate action. The complexity of the problem accompanying the intensification of wildfires requires complex approaches to finding an effective solution.

The dangers of wildfires include mortality, property damage, and morbidity. According to Rossiello and Szema, the increased number of fires in the wild imposes the danger of being killed or bearing cost losses and emotional complications (par. 2-4). The government experiences a financial burden when managing wildfires; the suppression costs have risen to over one billion per year since the 2000-s (Rossiello and Szema par. 5). Life safety and health problems are related to dangerous chemical pollution as a result of wildfires.

The common causes of wildfires are global warming and such supporting risk factors as forest health, ignition, and fuel characteristics. As Engel et al. found, “warm summer conditions, … low dry fuel moisture levels, ignition of most of the largest fire,” and diminished forest health have been the most likely drivers of the recent wildfires (Engel et al. 9). Despite the supporting factors, the overall rising average temperature on the planet is thoughts to be the main cause. Rossiello and Szema state that weather anomalies are influenced by the fact that the temperature rises by 0.9 degrees in a year (par. 2). Thus, climate change is a key

The uncontrolled and frequent occurrence of wildfires has multiple adverse effects on the ecosystems and people’s health. The production of large masses of smoke and human exposure to the chemicals causes respiratory diseases and higher morbidity and mortality rates (Williamson et al. 4). Deforestation, as the aftermath of wildfires, causes forest watersheds and lower drinking water quality (Hohner et al. 1235). It is vital to find an inter-disciplinary solution to eliminate these threats of wildfires.

Wildfires impose severe short- and long-term threats to human lives and the planet. Being caused by climate change, they lead to high mortality, smoke-induced morbidity, and ecological problems, such as diminished water quality, air pollution, and deforestation. Wildfire problem complexity triggers complex and inter-disciplinary approaches to solution-finding. Immediate action is needed on the local, federal, and international levels to prevent wildfires by eliminating their primary causes.

Works Cited

Engel, Ruth A., et al. “On the Causes of the Summer 2015 Eastern Washington Wildfires.” Environmental Research Communications , vol. 1, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-11.

Hohner, Amanda K., et al. “Wildfires Alter Forest Watersheds and Threaten Drinking Water Quality.” Accounts of Chemical Research, vol. 52, no. 5, 2019, pp. 1234-1244.

Rossiello, Michael R., and Anthony Szema. “Health Effects of Climate Change-Induced Wildfires and Heatwaves.” Cureus, vol. 11, no. 5, 2019, e4771, Web.

Williamson, G. J., et al. “A Transdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Health Effects of Wildfire and Prescribed Fire Smoke Regimes.” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 11, no. 12. 2016, pp. 1-12, Web.

• Wenchuan Earthquake: Impact on China's Economy
• Public Health Emergencies: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
• A Fire Research Program in the State of California
• Negative Environmental Impacts and Solutions
• Discussion: Logging in British Columbia
• Disaster and Emergency Planning and Management
• Description of the Amphan Storm Disaster in India
• Poor Communication During the Emergency of Hurricane Katrina
• South California Tsunami and Disaster Response
• Disaster Recovery Planning
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, September 7). Dangers, Causes, and Effects of Wildfires. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dangers-causes-and-effects-of-wildfires/

"Dangers, Causes, and Effects of Wildfires." IvyPanda , 7 Sept. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/dangers-causes-and-effects-of-wildfires/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Dangers, Causes, and Effects of Wildfires'. 7 September.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Dangers, Causes, and Effects of Wildfires." September 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dangers-causes-and-effects-of-wildfires/.

1. IvyPanda . "Dangers, Causes, and Effects of Wildfires." September 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dangers-causes-and-effects-of-wildfires/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Dangers, Causes, and Effects of Wildfires." September 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dangers-causes-and-effects-of-wildfires/.

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

• Skip to global NPS navigation
• Skip to the main content
• Skip to the footer section

Exiting nps.gov

Wildfire causes and evaluations.

Humans and Wildfire

Nearly 85 percent* of wildland fires in the United States are caused by humans. Human-caused fires result from campfires left unattended, the burning of debris, equipment use and malfunctions, negligently discarded cigarettes, and intentional acts of arson.

*Source: 2000-2017 data based on Wildland Fire Management Information (WFMI) and U.S. Forest Service Research Data Archive

Nature and Wildfire

Lightning is described as having two components—leaders and strokes. The leader is the probing feeler sent from the cloud. The return streaks of light are a series of strokes that produce the actual lightning bolt or flash that we see.

There are two types of lightning—cold lightning and hot lightning. Cold lightning is a return stroke with intense electrical current but of relatively short duration. Hot lightning has currents with less voltage, but these occur for a longer period of time. Fires are usually started by unusually long-lasting hot lightning bolts.

Evaluation of Wildland Fires

Wildland fire managers must constantly assess the threat of human-caused fire to wildlands and the threat of wildland fires to humans.

When wildfires begin, two major questions are asked:

• Does the wildfire threaten people and/or their personal property?
• Where is the wildfire located—in a forest or grassland, or in a human-dominated landscape?

Where people and property are threatened, all efforts are made to extinguish the fire. In some locations, such as large national parks and forests and where the wildfire is started by lightning, a natural fire may be permitted to burn its course to benefit the ecosystem. In these cases, natural barriers may contain a fire to within a specific area.

Wildfire investigators seek to understand the cause so agencies can prepare and implement prevention strategies. By understanding wildfire, managers can better plan for potential desirable and undesirable effects of wildfires. Although managers can be prepared, they cannot predict when or where fires are going to occur. Learn more about common wildfire causes and how they start.

You Might Also Like

• wildland fire
• learning in depth
• fire causes
• fire prevention
• human-caused fire
• wildfire statistics

Last updated: March 8, 2022