When trees burn, sometimes carbon offsets go with them. That’s why we’ve been tracking North American wildfires and their impact on offset projects for the last four years. As we launch our real-time fire tracker for the fifth year, however, we are looking at one of the highest risk fire seasons we’ve ever seen. In fact, one project is already burning.
That project, the Mescalero Apache project (CAR1183), is located in New Mexico. Hundreds of firefighters have been deployed to the fire and, so far, their efforts have kept the blaze relatively small.
However, the fire season in the Western U.S. is just getting started. And all indications point to widespread wildfire risk across the West this year. We’ve already seen record-breaking spring temperatures that caused widespread, early snowmelt across much of the region. Slowly melting snow helps keep forests and fuels wetter for longer. But with the snow already gone, fuels have already started drying out, setting the scene for dangerous fire conditions later this summer.
Those risks are readily apparent if you take a look at the National Interagency Fire Center’s Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlooks for later this summer. By September, NIFC projects “Above Normal” wildfire risk for all of the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, the entirety of Oregon and Washington, and the vast majority of both Idaho and Montana. After years of monitoring fire seasons across the West, we’ve never seen such an ominous forecast. Such widespread risk increases the likelihood of stretching already limited firefighting capabilities even thinner.
All of this matters because California’s forest offset program depends heavily on trees scattered across the arid West. Our tracker overlays these offset projects with real-time fire data to document how many credits are lost when projects burn. This allows us to evaluate the health of California’s offset insurance program, called the buffer pool, which is responsible for replacing offsets when they burn. Our research shows that nearly 40 percent of the state’s buffer pool has already been lost to fire, which threatens the long-term stability of the state’s forest offset program. California’s system simply wasn’t designed to withstand the extreme North American fire seasons that climate change has made more likely. As the season progresses, we’ll keep you updated when fires take a significant toll on offset projects. Follow our LinkedIn feed for the latest.