Topic Areas:

Manuscript Keywords:

coal, oil, gas, burned, forest fires, emissions, fossil fuel, cement manufacturers, fire. climate change, wildfire risk, New Mexico

Community Keywords:

coal, oil, gas, burned, forest fires, emissions, fossil fuel, cement manufacturers, fire. climate change, wildfire risk, New Mexico

Why is this useful?

State factsheet on the link between fossil fuels and forest fires in New Mexico

Citation:

Dahl, Kristina, Carly Phillips, Alicia Race, Shana Udvardy, and Pablo Ortiz. 2023. The Fossil Fuels behind Forest Fires: Quantifying the Contribution of Major Carbon Producers to Increasing Wildfire Risk in Western North America. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists. https://doi.org/10.47923/2023.15046

Abstract:

Coal, oil, and gas companies are now directly linked to worsening forest fires across the western United States. A peer-reviewed study from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 19.8 million acres of burned forest land—37 percent of the total area scorched by forest fires in the western United States and southwestern Canada since 1986—can be attributed to heat-trapping emissions traced to the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. Emissions from these companies and their products also contributed to nearly half of the increase in drought- and fire-danger conditions across the region since 1901. The study—and other attribution studies like it—offers policymakers, elected officials, and legal experts a scientific basis for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for the impacts of their products and their decades-long deception efforts.

Authors:

Kristina Dahl, Carly Phillips, Alicia Race, Shana Udvardy, J. Pablo Ortiz-Partida

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