Milder, wetter winters have a range of downsides that affect ecosystems, infrastructure, public health, and the economy. Key challenges include increased flooding risks, damage to roads, soil degradation, and impacts on water quality and wildlife.
More intense rainfall and frequent storms increase the risk of both river flooding and surface water flooding in urban areas. This can lead to significant damage to homes, infrastructure, and public spaces. Consistently wet soils can become compacted, reducing their fertility and health. Heavy winter rains can increase runoff, washing fertilisers, pesticides, and other pollutants into rivers and lakes, impacting water quality and local aquatic ecosystems. Milder winters can also disrupt the natural cycles of native species, from migration and hibernation to breeding and food availability.
And then there’s the increased likelihood of 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, USA, 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carsten Brinkschulte is CEO and co-founder of Dryad Networks. Dryad provides ultra-early detection of wildfires as well as health and growth-monitoring of forests using solar-powered gas sensors in a large-scale IoT sensor network. Dryad aims to reduce unwanted wildfires, which cause up to 20% of global CO2 emissions and have a devastating impact on biodiversity. By 2030, Dryad aims to prevent 2.8million hectares of forest from burning, preventing 1.1bn tonnes of CO2 emissions, saving 166m animals, and preventing $21bn in economic loss.
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