2020 was an interesting year to be sure. We had disease, civil unrest around the world, government intrigue, and even aliens (sort of). We had almost everything except zombies and the four horsemen. One thing we definitely had a lot of was fire. It started at the beginning of the year in Australia. The island continent has regular forest fires just like the western United States does every year. The fires of 2020 were uniquely bad though, getting so bad that in some places, it literally rained fire.
And speaking of the western US, things got crazy there for a while during the summer. Again, there are wildfires in California, Colorado, and elsewhere every year. 2020 though, saw days that were black as night from the ash, nights that were glowing red from the flames, deep red sunsets in the Midwest thanks to the massive amounts of ash in the upper atmosphere and even fire tornadoes. Yes, fire tornadoes. A person could be forgiven for thinking that the world was ending or at least that the millions of acres burning were setting new records.
Obviously from a climate perspective that’s bad. Millions of trees burned down, resulting in a massive loss of the planet’s capability to process CO2, not to mention the millions of tons of carbon added to the atmosphere thanks to the fires. Yet, what does that data show?
While there were definitely massive amounts of land cleared by flame in some areas, even record-setting amounts, that isn’t the whole story. As the data shows, the amount of forests burned down during 2020 was actually less than it was the previous year. So, there was some good news in 2020 after all.
As good as the news that we didn’t burn down half the trees on the planet is, it begs the question – how? One option that comes to mind is that maybe there is just less forest to burn. It would stand to reason given that we keep cutting trees down and hundreds of thousands of acres burn down in a good year that eventually there is just less to burn overall. Fortunately, the data shows that is not the case. The truth is that we are getting better at managing the forests.
Over the years, we have learned through solid data analysis that there are various ways to manage our forests to mitigate the risk from forest fires. These include establishing firebreaks, strips of land that don’t have any trees, to ensure that should a fire start it will only burn down a section of the forest instead of the whole state. Then there are the controlled burns and clearing out of the underbrush that we’ve been doing more of over the last couple of decades. These techniques starve a potential fire of the dry and readily available fuel that can turn a small fire that can be contained in a few hours into a blazing inferno that takes weeks to deal with.
TARTLE can help improve these techniques or find new ones through the data marketplace. With people already signed up all over the world, we can help uncover fire mitigation methods that are incredibly effective but might be unknown just because they were developed in an African village. With a tool like TARTLE that kind of information can be found and improved upon and put into practice.
We can also help identify the activities that we’re doing that are making fires more frequent and worse or are increasing the damage they cause. There may be types of consumption that contribute to forest fires, or it’s possible we could predict where they would be more likely and either avoid building near those areas or at least better protect ourselves and the forest when we do.
The possibilities to find new solutions to old problems with TARTLE are endless. When buyers and sellers plug into our marketplace they are plugging into a tool that can and will be used to help improve the lives of all of us.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
